Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
June 29, 2015

Hearing it all over again, is their any music drama greater, more revolutionary and more compelling than Winterreise? Schubert’s final song cycle, the music he must have sensed could be his last, is like nothing else in the history of the lied until the psychodramas of Hugo Wolf with their odour of 19th century fin de siècle. The composer knew it was original; he knew the work was “terrifying”; he feared his friends mightn’t ‘get it’; but he also believed that time would bring the world to understand and accept his icy odyssey of despair, disillusionment and introspection.

Quite what they made of it in 1827, heaven knows. What we make of it today – a work that commands our engagement through its sheer range of interpretation – is frankly up to the individual performers and the receptivity of their audience. And on the lieder scene today, there is no one equipped to do it justice like Austrain baritone Florian Boesch and pianist Malcolm Martineau. The former is a robust singer, a consummate actor and possesses a considerable intellect, worrying and mining his texts for every nugget of meaning. The latter is a...