Page 203 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

Julier Tower

There is no denying the arresting grandeur of the setting of Bridcut’s Winterreise.
Bright white, deep snow, stunning Alpine peaks – and that curious modern
structure set amidst it all. Benjamin Appl is as striking as the landscape, as
perfectly chiselled as those mountains, with deep blue eyes which burn with
passion or glaze with tears in the more poignant songs or passages, or occasionally
fix the viewer with an unsettling directness which only adds to the power of
Müller’s text and Schubert’s music. He has a wonderfully clear, clean voice, with a
range from a whispered pianissimo (the level of control here is impressive) to a
raging fortissimo. James Baillieu, playing a gorgeous Bösendorfer piano, whose

case seems to hark back to a Schubert-era instrument, brings depth and clarity to
the music. He avoids ponderousness in the darker songs and there are moments of
delicious sweetness or tender poignancy – in Der Lindenbaum or Frühlingstraum,
for example. But it is in the darker or more desolate songs that Baillieu really
portrays the wanderer’s predicament, often simply through judiciously placed
single notes or a fractional pause (“agogic accent”) before placing a note (Gefrorne
Tränen, for example). The closing song, Der Leiermann, is absolutely devastating in
its spare simplicity.

The performance of the music is first class, really engaging, and both singer and
pianist deftly capture Schubert’s emotional range and curious harmonic shifts (as
James Baillieu says in one of the commentaries, the shift from major to minor in
Schubert is like moving from one universe to another). The songs are occasionally
interspersed with commentary on the music, and there’s a wonderful segment of
Appl in conversation with mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender, discussing the
appropriateness of this music for the female voice as well as the male.