Ian Bostridge
This week I was present at the finest performance of Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise, I have ever seen or heard. I am unable to review it properly, because I know both the performers. I have a profound and historic foodie connection with the tenor, Ian Bostridge, and the pianist, Thomas Adès, first signed our farmhouse guestbook in 1978, aged seven.
The recital at the acoustically perfect Holywell Music Room (Europe’s oldest concert venue) was part of the Oxford Lieder Festival, “The Schubert Project: Bringing Schubert’s Vienna to Oxford,” 10 October to 1 November. It bills itself as “the UK’s First Complete Performance of Schubert’s Songs” (though there are concerts of other Schubert works as well as the Lieder). This is a feat the Austrian Schubertiade apparently will not achieve until its 2015 season.
Among the Oxford events is Imogen Cooper playing the Piano Sonata in B flat major D960 at a late-evening concert in the same marvellous venue (I bought the last two tickets). Others are taking place in the Sheldonian and even the Ashmolean. The roster of performing artists as is distinguished as the three named above implies.
What was so wonderful about the Bostridge/Adès Winterreise? In the first place, it is the first time I’ve seen or heard it performed as an equal partnership between the singer and the instrumentalist. Tom, who is a celebrated composer and conductor, was no mere accompanist, but brought out the piano’s role as equal soloist in all 24 songs, sometimes in contrast to the vocal part, sometimes simply providing a single note of harmony with the voice. His staccato notes were variously played with the force of a breaking icicle, or with the penetrative strength of a steel pin, but always with such power that I imagine the piano needed retuning after this set. The legato passages seemed fewer, but sang sweetly when called for, though gruffly when appropriate. In the final song, Tom became der Leirmann, and his piano was transmuted into a hurdy-gurdy by his cross-hands action. My seat was only feet away from the keyboard, and I can tell you that his emotional involvement and concentration were equal to Ian’s. He was in such precise control of his dynamics that you forgot that his Steinway is fundamentally a percussion instrument.
Ian sang, without music, tucked into the curve of the Steinway concert grand, his gestures economical, though his facial expressions conveyed a strong emotional punch. In his voice I heard wistfulness, bitterness, misery, briefly remembered joy, despair – genuinely complicated feelings. He is, though, a musician whose performance always communicates intellect. Of course, he is a DPhil of Oxford University, an expert on the role of witchcraft in English public life in the 17th and 18th centuries, Humanitas Professor of Classical Music and Education at the University of Oxford, 2014-15 and will be a visiting professor at UC Berkeley in 2015. But as you can, I think, tell from his recordings, he applies this great intelligence to the words and setting of Schubert’s greatest songs, in the service of their dramatic impact. Ian has a sympathy for both words and music that seems to me the product of careful study, as is his exquisite pronunciation of the German texts. His musicianship is equal to the great Schubert interpreters such as Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Schreier; and as for technique, there is no break between his head and chest voice, certainly less than you notice in Schreier’s late recordings of Winterreise, while Ian’s chest voice seems to me increasingly firm and beautiful.
Indeed, I think the Bostridge/Adès duo is at least as fine as the recordings (see YouTube) of Schreier/Richter and Fischer-Deiskau/Barenboim. I see that Disc 4 of the Ian Bostridge Box Set to be released on 10 November has a second Winterreise and well as the Disc 2 cycle with Leif Ove Andsnes. I suppose it’s too much to hope that it’s Adès on piano. The 14th Oxford Lieder Festival is 16-31 October 2015, and includes other composers along with Schubert. www.oxfordlieder.co.uk
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It’s great to see the pianist sharing the limelight with the singer! Though since lieder is billed as an equal partnership, it is perhaps surprising that your other Winterreise performances were less pianistically orientated. Last year I had the good fortune to hear Florian Boesch with Malcolm Marineau and the latter was anything but self-effacing, in fact my memories are as much of pianistic drama as of an increasingly despairing wanderer. Back further, I encountered Wolfgang Holzmair and Andreas Haefliger in a very different kind of equal partnership in which Haefliger conjured up rich tones that complemented the baritone’s bright, occasionally harsh, timbre, while the two were completely in synch in conveying a truly remarkable variety of mood, albeit often so fleeting as to be almost imperceptible. I use the recording they made to explore examples from Gerald Moore’s book on the Schubert cycles, which, naturally, gives due weight to the piano! “>