Page 190 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22
P. 190
The Red Tower
The German baritone Benjamin Appl, in whom we have been celebrating
one of the most important song talents of the present day for several years,
has understood this clairvoyantly. He and his congenial piano accompanist
James Baillieu, both born in 1982, have just made the leap in quality of a
"Winterreise" recording: A cinematic staging of the 24 songs, in the Swiss
snowy landscape of the 2284-meter-high Julier Pass in Graubünden,
around the 30-meter-high Julier Tower, a polygonal theater building made
of glulam, which the founder of the Origen Theater Festival, Giovanni
Netzer, had built in 2017. Deliberately as a temporary measure, which is to
be dismantled again by 2023.
