Transcentury blog spot - INFODAD.COM (US)
++++ (Max)
Schubert: Winterreise. Jakob Bloch Jespersen, bass-baritone; Sharon Prushansky, fortepiano. OUR Recordings. $17.99.
Elena Ruehr: Songs—Five Men; Lied; Travel Songs; Wonderful Bears; Lullabies & Spring Songs. Stephen Salters, baritone; Donald Berman and David Zobel, piano. AVIE. $19.99.
Schubert wrote Winterreise for tenor, just as he wrote the earlier Die schöne Müllerin for that vocal range – but he himself started the tradition of transposing the cycles for other voices, partnering with baritone Johann Michael Vogl on tours through Austria. The tenor voice, in both cycles, emphasizes the youthfulness of the protagonist; but given the deeper darkness of Winterreise, a lower voice is more effective at enhancing the gloom of the monodrama – to the extent that Schubert’s music needs any enhancement. The key to an effective Winterreise for lower voice is the singer’s ability to express the underlying naïveté of the spurned lover’s thinking while projecting a greater aura of mature sorrow that stops just short of complete despair. The protagonist of Die schöne Müllerin is more boyish; the one of Winterreise, although still young, suffers emotionally in what can be considered a more mature and complex way. Jakob Bloch Jespersen does an absolutely first-rate job of traversing this emotional landscape in his new Winterreise from OUR Recordings. The resonance of his voice, which fully plumbs bass-baritone depths in some songs but sits comfortably in the baritone range most of the time, brings depth as well as aural beauty to the grief expressed in Wilhelm Müller’s comparatively simple and naïve poetry – which is included in German but, unfortunately for English speakers, not translated. Key to Jespersen’s interpretation is the slow emergence, as Winterreise progresses, of a general sense of sorrow, beyond that occasioned by lost love, and eventually a sense of existential despair that persists right through the puzzling and ambiguous final Der Leiermann. A fine singer carries the audience through the hour-plus of Winterreise in ways that slowly but surely deepen the anguish – which is never, however, unmixed with beauty in the music. There is a silky smoothness to Jespersen’s rendition that makes the sense of ever-deepening sorrow increasingly clear, with Der Lindenbaum, the fifth song, having something closest to a sense of peacefulness until the singer turns his back on the tree and starts (or continues) on a road leading ever downward emotionally. The headlong Rückblick and almost static Irrlicht that follows it are but one example of the musical contrast and duality that Jespersen explores to fine effect. And here as throughout the cycle, the playing of Sharon Prushansky immeasurably enhances the overall listening experience. This is because Prushansky plays a fortepiano – a replica of one built in the 1810s – rather than a modern concert grand. Again and again the exceptional value of this instrumental choice comes through – Frühlingstraum and Das Wirtshaus are two especially fine examples among many. The lighter and slightly harsh sounds of the fortepiano, the skillful way Prushansky utilizes the instrument’s pedals to vary the aural palette, the lesser key travel (compared to a modern piano’s) that produces a more-intimate feeling and leads to a very different balance between voice and piano from that experienced when Winterreise is performed by a tenor backed up by a modern instrument – all these elements, plus a recording that very skillfully balances vocal and instrumental sounds, result in a reading of depth, sensitivity, and emotional coherence, flowing from beauty to beauty as the cycle wends its way through the chill of the outer and inner landscapes in which it takes place.