EGN NEWS DESK
It was a efficiency of hard-won knowledge. When the eminent pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore teamed up for Schubert’s “Winterreise” on Friday at Zankel Hall, they introduced the maturity of hindsight to a genre-defining work of younger, unrequited love. The live performance was a part of Uchida’s Perspectives sequence with Carnegie Hall.
Schubert’s cycle contains 24 songs, most of them in minor keys, and derives from the pure world countless metaphors for heartache. The winter’s journey of the title begins with a breakup, and the narrator spends the remainder of the time ruminating upon the fallout. The narrator’s beloved, he says, proved to be as fickle as a climate vane batted by the wind. His tears freeze and scald, and his numbness hides a roiling grief, like a river seething under a floor of ice.
The piano half has the capability to amplify or touch upon the narrator’s psychological state, and Uchida used it to console him like a smart, empathetic buddy. She eased into key adjustments with refined decelerations. The octaves of “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”) had been clear, quite than towering, and the rustling of branches had a dusky high quality as if seen by means of the mollifying haze of a dream. In “Wasserflut” (“Flood”), she dealt with chromatic semitones with utmost delicacy to attenuate the influence of their dissonant pangs. Her efficiency got here to a peak in “Das Wirtshaus” (“The Inn”), the place a gradual, agency sequence of full-fingered chords offered ineffable consolation.
The narrator’s beloved dominates the primary half, however in a curious twist, she largely vanishes within the second, as his despair consumes him and convinces him that he’s destined for all times as a social pariah.
Uchida achieved arresting coherence throughout the whole cycle, however Padmore dug extra particularly into that time of divergence. His acidulous tone, a clumsy match for the cycle’s early expressions of younger heartbreak, illuminated the existential anguish of a soul who has determined he’s higher off misplaced. Rather than battle with that anguish, Padmore’s narrator embraced it with a way of finality past his years.
Padmore muscled his approach by means of the cycle’s first 12 songs, summoning a pointed resonance however no actual sense of line in Schubert’s gracious melodies. The milky softness of his tone in early recordings has curdled, and his approach, which used to domesticate mellifluousness with frequent use of a exact and floaty blended voice, now produces a tough and unwieldy sound that veers out of tune.
His interpretation pivoted on the third track of the second half, “Die Krähe” (“The Crow”), the place his narrator’s self-pity and mordant resentments transmogrified into macabre fascinations with loss of life. As he gazed on the sky with a ugly smile and welcomed the crows to choose at his bones, his grip on actuality loosened. He nurtured a nascent misanthropy in “Im Dorfe” (“In the Village”) and “Der stürmische Morgen” (“The Stormy Morning”). His voice grew to become much less effortful as he now not fought to muster quantity; he settled into the modest dimension and pure level of his instrument with disturbing calm and carved tremendous slits within the air as if with an murderer’s blade.
In a approach, Padmore’s diminished capabilities underlined the profundity of the narrator’s wizened state. In the final track, the narrator encounters a hurdy-gurdy participant, a forgotten previous man on the outskirts of city. The ghostly imaginative and prescient stuffed Padmore’s voice with awe as he contemplated becoming a member of the person in self-imposed exile.
Carnegie’s Perspectives sequence is a chance for artists to share their distinctive factors of view on repertoire, and Uchida and Padmore did simply that, taking the narrator to his bleakest second with a purpose to discover a bit of sunshine.
