Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself. But Kaufmann rightly insisted that Hotter’s various recordings are dramatic, with Hotter enacting, not narrating the monodrama. So it’s not always easy to tell.
There was no doubt, though, in Christian Gerhaher’s recent performance of the cycle at the Wigmore Hall, with his long-time accompanist Gerold Huber, that we were witnessing the journey and sufferings presented directly. The atmosphere in the hall was extraordinary — a mid-January evening and not a cough to be heard. There was even a gap of silence after the final song, before tentative applause began and swelled.
Oddly, Gerhaher used a music stand and seemed to consult the score between songs, in a work that he and Huber must have performed dozens of times, though surely never with greater intensity than here.
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