Page 117 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

windows that connect the inside to the Alpine landscape that surrounds it. It is a
remarkable fusion of the old and the new, and to add to its magic is the element of

transience: it will be dismantled later this year and vanish forever.

The baritone Benjamin Appl was giving a masterclass in Basel when one of his

students posted photos of the tower on Instagram. ‘I was immediately intrigued. It’s
so surreal. I’d never seen anything like it,’ he recalls. A couple of years ago he went

there to perform and it proved one of the greatest artistic experiences of his career to
date. ‘Everything was so inspiring. What Netzer does is extraordinary. He constructs

a stage just for a few weeks in the most amazing places. It may be in the middle of a
village, on a frozen lake, on a dam, or high up in the mountains. And it attracts

audiences completely different from, say, the ones at big established European
festivals. People come for the music, not just to be seen. So, having found this
tower, I thought, that’s exactly the place to perform Winterreise. Given the strange

times we are living through I’d been thinking about Winterreise a lot, and how its
relevance to our time is so heightened. We hear so much these days about climate

change, the disappearing ice, the loneliness people are experiencing, the fear of
other people, of distance, of rootlessness … And the fact that the tower would be

demolished added a sense of urgency.’

Having found his venue and the music to sing there, the next stage was to create a

project, and his enthusiasm fired up the film-maker John Bridcut, who has given us
so many remarkable documentaries on subjects like Dame Janet Baker, Bernard

Haitink, Jonas Kaufmann and Benjamin Britten. The idea developed to capture a
performance of Winterreise filmed in and around the tower, the voice recorded in the

various chosen settings, the piano recorded in the tower. For the film, called Winter
Journey and due for broadcast by the BBC any time now, Appl was joined by his

regular piano partner James Baillieu. But, in an embarras de richesses, the two
musicians have given us not only that filmed Winterreise, done entirely on location in
Switzerland, but also a studio recording made in London within weeks of the film, as

the first album of Appl’s new substantial contract with Alpha Classics.