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Details
The Forum - Malvern Theatres
Grange Road
Great Malvern
Malvern
Worcestershire
WR14 3HB
England
Programme
Franz Schubert – Winterreise, D.911
Performers
Roderick Williams – baritone
Iain Burnside – piano
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
Malvern Concert Club’s President, Roderick Williams, and Iain Burnside return to Malvern for this second annual recital in their series encompassing all three of Schubert’s major song cycles.
Winterreise (Winter Journey) is a cycle of 24 songs based on poems by Wilhelm Müller. As tenor Ian Bostridge has written, ‘the songs are forerunners, in a sense, of all those songs of love and loss that have been the soundtrack of generation on generation of teenagers. But the loss of love, which is only sketched ambiguously in the first song, Goodnight, is just the beginning of it. Schubert’s wanderer embarks on a journey through a winter landscape that leads him to question his identity, the conditions of his existence – social, political and metaphysical – and the meaning of life. And it is all done with light and shadow, moving between sardonic humour and depressive longing. The wanderer’s tears turn to ice; he sees flowers etched in the frost of the hut where he takes refuge; he is eyed from the sky by a carrion crow, his only faithful companion; and at the last, he sees a beggar musician playing in the street, ignored and unrewarded, the hurdy-gurdy man’.
Roderick Williams has maintained his own online account of his Schubert project (performed with Iain Burnside and other pianists) online at: rwschubertcycleproject.blogspot.co.uk.