Po3 - A Winter's Journey 3/12/17

[aeolium]

I very much enjoyed listening to the arrangement of Schubert's Die Winterreise for tenor, accordion, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horn and bass clarinet on Performance on 3 - A Winter's Journey on Sunday night. Though this arrangement is not to be compared with the original, I thought the sonorities created by the unusual chamber ensemble were interesting and for the most part worked pretty well with the individual songs. The accordion was subtly deployed and in Das Wirtshaus the instrumentalists provided a humming chorale. It resulted in a work of completely different character from the original. I started listening with misgivings, but was pleasantly surprised and would gladly hear another concert performance of this arrangement. Christoph Prégardien sung excellently, and this performance was also enlivened by the frequent contributions of birdsong from within the venue!

I think in this arrangement the order of the songs is slightly different, following the order of the poet Wilhelm Müller rather than Schubert.

[bluestateprommer]

I very much enjoyed listening to the arrangement of Schubert's Die Winterreise for tenor, accordion, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horn and bass clarinet on Performance on 3 - A Winter's Journey on Sunday night. Though this arrangement is not to be compared with the original, I thought the sonorities created by the unusual chamber ensemble were interesting and for the most part worked pretty well with the individual songs. The accordion was subtly deployed and in Das Wirtshaus the instrumentalists provided a humming chorale. It resulted in a work of completely different character from the original. I started listening with misgivings, but was pleasantly surprised and would gladly hear another concert performance of this arrangement. Christoph Prégardien sung excellently, and this performance was also enlivened by the frequent contributions of birdsong from within the venue!

I think in this arrangement the order of the songs is slightly different, following the order of the poet Wilhelm Müller rather than Schubert.

Indeed, the order of the songs in this performance did follow the order of Müller's final published version of the 24 poems, rather than Schubert. I have the Graham Johnson Schubert series booklet note for Winterreise on hand here, and GJ commented on how Müller's order appears to be a much less downbeat version of the poet's journey, with the poet facing his dark night of the soul and coming out reasonably safe on the other side, with 'Der Leiermann' as the first person he meets and tries to make contact with, to restore his own contact with humanity.

This less-downbeat feel actually fits in with the instrumentation rather well, because this instrumentation gives the cycle a quality encapsulated in a word that one would normally never associate with Schubert's cycle, namely the word "perky". I admit that the accordion took me completely aback at the start, but only as I listened did the inside joke of including accordion in the instrumentation hit me, namely the connection to 'Der Leiermann' at the very end. The bright timbres of the accordion and the winds do counteract the somber mood of the poems, but also kind of justify the more upbeat/less downbeat conclusion and resolution of the journey.

As you say, definitely a one-off experience. But it's good outside-of-the-box thinking, something not common in classical music (it seems).