TRACKLISTING

1 Gute Nacht
2 Die Wetterfahne
3 Geforne Tränen
4 Erstarrung
5 Der Lindenbaum
6 Wasserflut
7 Auf dem Flusse
8 Rückblick
9 Irrlicht
10 Rast
11 Frülingstraum
12 Einsamkeit
13 Die Post
14 Der greise Kopf
15 Die Krähe
16 Letze Hoffnung
17 Im Dorfe
18 Der stürmische Morgen
19 Täuschung
20 Der Wegweiser
21 Das Wirtshaus
22 Mut
23 Die Nebensonnen
24 Der Leiermann

RECORDING INFORMATION

Alfred Brendel and Matthias Goerne, recorded live at the Wigmore Hall, London in October 2003.

“...what can only be called the Winterreise of our time. This towering performance convinced not only through its deeply felt emotions but its dramatic variety, complexity, vitality and colour ...extraordinary singing, which left me awed.”
Musicweb

A real recording event. Baritone Matthias Goerne accompanied by Alfred Brendel together at London's Wigmore Hall for a deeply moving performance of Schubert's great song cycle recorded “live”. A recording which will be eagerly anticipated by the press and public alike and may well present a new benchmark recording of this essential work.

Matthias Goerne follows his acclaimed Decca recording of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin with this live recording of another great Schubert song cycle — Winterreise — possibly the zenith of the lieder singers art. Goerne's dark baritone voice is, perhaps, ideal for this most darkly intense of cycles telling of the despairing journey of a broken hearted man into a bleak and frozen landscape.

Legendary pianist Alfred Brendel brings to this work the weight of a lifelong exploration of the piano music of Schubert and the subtle colourings of his musical palette.

“...this towering performance convinced not only through its deeply felt emotions but its dramatic variety, complexity, vitality and colour: this was a Winterreise entirely devoid of superfluity of any kind, whether in musical or physical gesture, and came from a wholly different world to that of the majority of performances of these songs. These are men who have lived with and loved this incomparable music for a collective total of some eighty years, yet their reading is as fresh and startling as any offered by yet another voiceless wannabe: Goerne’s interpretation has evolved so far beyond that of his early recording (with Graham Johnson on Hyperion) and even that of his performances of two years ago with Eric Schneider, that one feels that one is hearing the songs anew, not in any way distorted but simply refracted through the love of two great musicians.

I used the word “love” advisedly, since it is more than anything else a deep love for the songs which characterizes this reading, evident not only in the depth of the interpretation but the shaping of the phrases themselves and in the subtlety and complexity of the understanding of the poems. It’s true that Goerne has one of the most purely beautiful voices around, but that beauty is here used in the service of the music rather than being served by it, and Brendel’s equally devoted, yet far more austere sensibility formed the perfect foil. I had not previously seen them as ideal partners: unequalled in their own fields, of course, but it seemed to me that Goerne’s musical spirit is of a different kind to Brendel’s — where the older man is cerebral, cultivated, exact, the younger is emotional, unhewn, fluid: yet here, all of their individual qualities seemed to merge into one balanced whole ... the performance will be repeated on Friday and recorded on CD, thereby not only preserving one of the great musical partnerships, and one which it is reasonable to assume will not be thus preserved too many times in the future, but allowing us to experience again what can only be called the Winterreise of our time.”
Melanie Eskenazi on Musicweb