A Winter’s Journey,
Franz Schubert’s song cycle set to 24 poems by Wilhelm Muller is composed in two parts, each 
containing twelve songs. The first
is set in February 1827 and the second in October of the same year, and narrates a story about despair and the soul
of a rejected lover. He leaves his home at night and embarks on a journey; dark and barren landscapes greet him on
his travels, a man tortured by his innermost feelings of love and thoughts of his own death and
loneliness.
In this new performance space, the Howard Assembly Rooms, part of the Leeds Grand Theatre and now the new permanent home of Opera North as a performance and rehearsal venue, the intimacy, acoustic and ambience of the hall was the perfect setting for such a concert, with the added medium of using song and film together, in this joint venture by Opera North and Leeds City Art Gallery and the talents of German born artist and film maker Mariele Neudecker, made for a most enlightening evening with two very different arts forms, which successfully fused into a visual and engaging recital.
The concept of applying moving images to Schubert, complemented the music far more than I thought it would. It was not a distraction, nor did it steal or take away from the beauty of the voice and piano. Each of the 24 songs, accompanied by its own film depicting a stage in the journey that was filmed in Shetland, Oslo, Helsinki and St Petersburg during the winter months of 2003. By using just a chair and a suitcase on the platform, it transformed the recital performance into a theatrical, semi-staged work.
Lancashire born bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams, gave a strong and fine vocal performance. It is a considerable task in itself just to hold all of this together for the duration of the 24 songs without pause for well over an hour.This is in essence a very beautiful instrument, with careful phrasing and considerate attention to the detail of the music and verse. The rich velvety middle of his voice stirs up the musical emotion of the work and he executes this all with apparent ease. My only concern would be the occasional excessive boom to his voice; less would be better for such an intimate piece and for the size of hall. As a result, the vocal line maintained no distinction between the colours which are needed to convey the desperation of feelings in Muller’s text. None of this however, can detract from the talented musicality and the quality of the sound that he produces.
Foster-Williams was accompanied at the piano by
Christopher Gould, whose performance and musical vigilance gave gravitas to the piece and showed
the equal importance of the pianist to that of the singer. His sensitive and intelligent playing depicted neatly the
many flourishes of Schubert’s score and Muller’s poems, such as the effects of nature, the harsh echo of the
elements, rushing storms, howling icy winds, the water under the ice, ravens croaking and birds singing.
This imaginative and engaging collaborative partnership, succeeded in making this a very enjoyable evening,
with the images provided by Neudecker adding an extra dimension to the exploration of the music. It is also very
good news that Opera North now has its very own venue, in which it can experiment with smaller and more intimate
works that would be impossible to undertake in the main house. Since the opening last year, they have already put
together an exciting and challengingly diverse programme of events. With its commitment to education and engaging
with audiences both old and new, one can look forward to many more enterprising performances.
Paul Dalton
Opera Britannia
thing to say about this recording is that one needs to put out of one’s mind most of the famous recordings that have preceded it since what one is accustomed to hear from the Callas, Sutherland, Caballé recordings or even further back excerpts from Cigna or Ponselle is a radically different work of art. Giovanni Antonini, Riccardo Minasi and Maurizio Biondihave spent years scraping away the barnacles of dubious performance tradition and updated instrumentation and restoring hundreds of small cuts that have become part of the standard performing edition. As with a restored oil painting the removal of years of accumulation has revealed a very different work of art. Indeed I would say that it redefines the work both in terms of sound and in appropriate casting.
attended Sunday’s “Flórez and Friends” concert at the Barbican – as opposed to sitting through oceans of orchestral filler in the RFH in order to dribble over the unfeasible length of Jonas Kaufmann’s ‘Wälse’ – you may be forgiven for wondering how an audience already in a state of chronic, uncritical delight could possibly be pleasured any more. In which case, you needed to be at tonight’s solo recital, the latest tranche of Juan Diego Flórez’s Barbican residency, which comprehensively proved the time-honoured adage “it ain’t over until the sooty-lashed one sings at least four encores”. The nubile bounced around, whooping; the mature squirmed with satisfaction in their seats, emitting the odd low moan; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the lame weren’t seen dancing in the aisles, and the dead – always a fair percentage of any opera audience – weren’t newly-risen. Indeed, anyone suffering with scrofula could well have been cured merely by touching his immaculately tailored trousers (though I’m still working out how to explain this to the police).
In a pivotal scene in Verdi’s early opera, Pope Leo squares up to the defiant Attila, causing the Hun to turn tail. Here, two leading Slavic basses – Russian Ildar Abdrazakov and Bulgarian Orlin Anastassov – go head to head in the title role, but it proves to be something of an uneven contest due both to their supporting casts and the conditions in which the two performances were captured on film. Both are fairly traditionally staged and costumed, which should satisfy those pining for the days when Huns looked like Huns, but a few minutes viewing of each disc is enough to separate the wheat from the operatic chaff. In the blue corner, Arturo Gama’s production from the Mariinsky Theatre, released on its own label; in the red corner, a rudderless affair laughably attributed to director Plamen Kartaloff, recorded in the ruins of the Bulgarian fortress of Tsaverets.
