New release
February 2011


Songs of sorrow and yearning, death and self-discovery

A new recording of Franz Schubert's Winterreise

 Anyone who dares to put a new recording of Franz Schubert's Winterreise on the market must have something to say. First, to the present day there has been no greater challenge to the lied singer than this cycle, with which Schubert paid farewell to the world hardly a year before his own death. With its unpretentious simplicity, silky plainness, fragile strength and deathly inner pulse, it demands simply everything from its interpreters: sensitivity and detachment, euphoria and poise, naturalness and impeccable taste, superb technique and intimate expression. Moreover, recordings of Winterreise are legion, and a few more appear every year – especially in winter.

 No sooner had Troubadisc's producers heard baritone Nikolay Borchev and pianist Friedrich Suckel than one thing was perfectly clear: it had to be Winterreise. The expressive power and suavity that these two young artists bring to the work were beyond question. Born in Pinsk in Belarus in 1980 and a member of the Munich Opera ensemble since 2003, Borchev is a versatile, successful, up-and-coming musician of many interests who will probably be much talked about in the future. Friedrich Suckel, born in Berlin in 1979, was hired by Christian Thielemann as a répétiteur while still a student and has worked with musicians of the stature of Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez and Thomas Hengelbrock. The manner in which these two artists project Winterreise is highly reflective and sublimated, an unbroken flow of inner experience that has no need of recognition from the world at large, yet deserves it all the more for that very reason.

 Indeed, in its timelessness and modernity alike, Winterreise is unique. From the very outset everything drifts ineluctably toward death, travelling a path on which the nameless protagonist actually has no other choice but to transcend despair and solitude, longing and misery, and to accept his destiny. Death becomes a friend in life. Suffering is deeply lamented, yet through all the vicissitudes of the winter journey and the upsurges of feelings there shine a serenity and a detachment that help him to find comfort in himself and in his submission to Fate – a comfort denied him by the outside world. Der Leiermann (The organ grinder), the last of the twenty-four songs and thus the cycle’s final destination, is not a different person whom the lonely wanderer meets on his journey: he is Death, self-discovery, acceptance of his own being. The search has found its end. Granted, for our protagonist this is not so much an answer as the gateway to a larger question: what comes afterwards?

 Wilhelm Müller's poems, with their naive, folk-like style and inflection, would hardly have survived as great art on their own merits. But in one song after another Schubert manages to magnify the words with depth, richness and substance, and he does so without contradiction, irony or aloofness, in perfect rapport with the written words. He also succeeds, with purely musical means, in forging this loose string of evocative poems into an irreversible and fully convincing whole. It is an inexplicable miracle of the cyclic lied and a challenge and acid test that every singer must face anew. Here, in this purity and limpidity, where nothing can be feigned, is where true mastery resides.