Schubert: Winterreise
Mark Padmore tenor
Julius Drake piano
Our Winter Festival opens with this epic tale of lost love and despair. Rejected by his beloved, the protagonist sets out on a brutally icy and lonely journey, with only the snow, the bare trees and the occasional crow to keep him company. A gradual descent into madness ensues, depicted in some of Schubert’s most devastatingly beautiful music. Schubert himself was dying when he wrote this bleak and powerful cycle, described by Ian Bostridge as ‘an indispensable work of art that should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust.’
Duration: approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes (no interval)
"I was awed in following the German texts to register how immaculate and internalised was his honouring of the text and how delicate his inflection of every syllable"
The Daily Telegraph - on Mark Padmore"The piano felt like a whole orchestra, descriptive and evocative; Drake’s magisterial command of tonal inflections allowing him to invest Schubert’s transitions from minor to major mode and major to minor with acute emotional point"
The Guardian