United Kingdom Schubert: Sam Poppleton (baritone), Harry Sever (piano). St. Martin’s Church, Salisbury, 8.2.2025. (CK)
Schubert – Winterreise
Schubert’s Winterreise. Ian Bostridge known as it the primary and biggest of idea albums (virtually a century-and-a-half forward of Sergeant Pepper). After all, while you carry out it reside you need to do it in a single 75-minute take.
Sam Poppleton and Harry Sever got here on like characters from a Beckett play – Vladimir and Estragon, maybe: Harry to the piano on the entrance, Sam to the again of the church. Their efficiency was memorable not least for the allusive richness generated between the 24 stations of Müller’s and Schubert’s bleak imaginative and prescient, the visible nod to the Theatre of the Absurd and the inescapable overtones of enacting them in a church – the oldest in Salisbury, apparently, predating the Cathedral.
We would anticipate a music entitled Gute Nacht to shut a piece, to not open it. This primary (and longest) music turned a form of processional, a distant echo, maybe, of the Stations of the Cross. Sam has a gorgeous baritone voice, predominantly and attractively ethereal and light-weight, with a top quality that means – to me, anyway – vulnerability. The flip to the foremost, on this music and elsewhere within the cycle, was heart-rending fairly than comforting: we sense, even when we have no idea what’s to come back, that such moments will probably be transient and illusory. The softening of the voice on the music’s finish tugged on the coronary heart.
Winterreise shouldn’t be fairly a partnership of equals, however the piano is as a lot a protagonist as an accompaniment. In Harry Sever’s fingers the turbulent openings of songs comparable to Die Wetterfahne, Erstarrung and Rückblick made a powerful impression; he was unfailingly conscious of the sombre imagery of Müller’s poems – frozen tears and the like – and to the gamut of feelings that Schubert’s music runs from tenderness and poignancy to numbness and despair. The acoustic of St Martin’s blurred a few of the element, however basically the ambient heat and resonance contributed positively to the ability of the efficiency of pianist and singer alike. They understood one another completely: the sinister piano in Gefror’ne Tränen was matched by the darkening of the voice within the center stanza, and in Der Lindenbaum they each persuaded us – the piano half blossoming, the voice in a radiant main key – that we had reached an oasis. It doesn’t final: there was ache in addition to tenderness in Sam’s last stanza.
In Wasserflut we have been again to the frozen minor, relieved solely by the passing heat of the delicate breeze. Touchingly, Sam knelt down to deal with the snow; he took the trace in Rast to take the burden off his ft, and stayed sitting till the bouncing introduction to Die Submit had him springing to his ft.
Every music is a mini-drama, nevertheless it appeared to me that one thing extra was occurring in Frühlingstraum – not a lot a turning-point as a change, the start of one thing ruinous, even the onset of insanity. The beautiful piano opening – Sam nonetheless taking his ease – jarred with the horror of the crowing cocks and cawing ravens within the second stanza: the distinction was so vividly pointed by each voice and piano that there was a touch of schizophrenia in it. By the subsequent songs, so far as Täuschung, Sam’s traveller appeared progressively alienated, pushed in on himself: the full-throated, heroic confidence of ‘Mein Herz!’ in Die Submit gave method to hole, sepulchral tones in Der greise Kopf; and there was a fey humour in his elimination of his hat whereas the crow flies spherical his naked head. In Harry’s accompaniment to Letzte Hoffnung we might virtually see the wind enjoying with the leaves; and Sam’s voice on the poignant shut sounded appropriately hole.
Sam’s actions have been by no means a distraction: if something, his efficiency was notable for its naturalness and its avoidance of any form of exaggeration or attitudinising. In Im Dorfe his actions – a form of mild clowning (or is he himself a leaf performed with by the wind?) – prompt his detachment from the issues of the sleeping villagers; and when in Der stürmische Morgen his coat turned his imaginary dance companion he made an oddly touching, Prufrock-like determine.
And so we reached the signpost, Der Wegweiser, and a form of readability: all that now stands between him and his loss of life is the journey (a predicament, I suppose, that all of us share). For all of the hymn-like gravity of the introduction to Das Wirtshaus, the graveyard received’t admit him: there was weariness right here in Sam’s faltering voice, and bitterness in his acceptance that he should press onwards. Hat and coat went again on. His Mut! was the bitter bravado of a person on the sting, evaporating shortly in Die Nebensonnen as his head dropped once more. Full-voiced within the second stanza, exhausted within the transient third, Sam’s traveller right here touched tragic stature.
When the tenor James Gilchrist carried out Winterreise in Winchester a few years in the past he cautioned towards investing the hurdy-gurdy man with an excessive amount of symbolic significance: he’s a momentary companion solely, a brother of King Lear’s poor bare wretches, who the traveller overtakes earlier than he passes out of sight and listening to looking for his personal quietus. Possibly: however in Der Leiermann (sung the place he had began, behind the church) Sam’s voice appeared like an echo of itself; virtually just like the disembodied voice from a cellphone with a poor sign, simply beginning to break up. It was most affectingly accomplished; and it prompt, harrowingly, that the journey onwards wouldn’t be lengthy.
It was an excellent efficiency, compelling from first to final, persistently shifting, magnificently thought by means of. It’s clear from their transient biographies within the programme that each artists are busily and promisingly engaged: Harry as a conductor, primarily at main opera homes and festivals, and Sam as a member of prestigious choirs together with VOCES8 and Tenebrae. It’s also heartening to learn that they’re each dedicated to instructional work in lots of types. Our sympathy is invited for Sam as ‘a long-suffering Newcastle Utd. supporter’: now that the Magpies are an oil sheikh’s plaything, like so many Premier League golf equipment, that phrase may have enhancing (as a Bristol Metropolis fan I in all probability know extra about struggling than he does). Regardless of: it was a privilege to listen to and to see them convey Schubert’s daunting masterpiece to life, and an expertise that I’m unlikely to neglect.
Chris Kettle
