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Fanfare 2. review - 5 stars

February 4, 2025

Dominic Hartley.

Five stars: A dramatic and musically satisfying take on Schubert's masterpiece.

I can think of no higher compliment to pay Jakob Bloch Jespersen and Sharon Prushansky's new account of Winterreise than to say it brings home at every juncture the startling originality of Schubert's vision. How have they achieved this? A genuine and pervasive collaboration: a bass baritone with a particularly luxurious lower register perfectly matched with some wonderful fortepiano playing.
It feels to me as if Jespersen spent a long time with Müller's poems before he went anywhere near the music. He inhabits the protagonist with intensity, and has a fine sense both for the drama of each song and the overall tragic arc. In the perceptive liner note that he has penned with Prushansky they talk of Müller's cycle as "a study of grief" and make the point that the journey described in the poem is undertaken to deal with a dual loss. So not just the loss of the "beloved", but also that of the vision of a simple, happy life with her. I think that's exactly right and I don't think it's fanciful of me to hear Jespersen's portrayal of bewilderment, turning to desperation and finally madness as being underpinned by the shattering of that dream. Listen to his bemusement caused by his frozen tears in “Gefror'ne Tränen”, his bleak reaction on awakening in “Frühlingstraum” and his final derangement in his conversation with the Hurdy-Gurdy Man in “Der Leiermann” and you will hear what I mean. Notably, he achieves this with deeply musical, often beautiful singing.
In some ways Prushansky's inhabiting of the stage is even more remarkable. She has an instinctive sense of the liminal aspects of Schubert's piano writing. From the opening of “Gute Nacht” where the right-hand piano ornament injects an insidious instability before a word is sung, to a sound world drained of color, spiraling into despair in “Der Leiermann”, her realization of the score is riveting. The tonal palette she produces on the fortepiano is extraordinary: not just the vividness and transparency one would expect with such an instrument but real subtlety and gradation too. For the most part she achieves all this without resort to her instrument’s built in special effects. When she does use them it can be highly dramatic, the electrifying use of the bassoon stop halfway through “Der Lindenbaum” a spectacular example.
It's obvious from their liner note how much these musicians have thought about and discussed the cycle. The more so as soon as you listen to their performance. There's dialogue, instinctive mutual understanding, above all, complete selflessness from each in their goal to realize a really satisfying, psychologically credible interpretation. I should add that the balance and recorded sound achieved by the OUR engineers is first rate, sealing the immediacy and vitality of the performance, one of the most compelling I've heard for a long time. My favorite version of the cycle with fortepiano hitherto has been Mark Padmore with Kristian Bezuidenhout, on Harmonia Mundi (HMM902264DI), but this newcomer has so much to offer and given the difference in voice types (and fortepiano sound) I'd say listen to both if you can.
Dominic Hartley.

Five stars: A dramatic and musically satisfying take on Schubert's masterpiece.

© 2024 by OUR Recordings

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