Winterreise is yet another work I am not sure I have ever heard live in the concert hall (though I am pretty sure I have heard at various times Die Schone Mullerin and Schwanengesang). I got to know Winterreise as a student through the Britten / Pears recording so I always have a tenor in my head singing this, rather than a baritone or bass. I have only heard Allan Clayton once before – he sung On Wenlock Edge at the Wigmore Hall about 9 years ago – but he had rave reviews singing Peter Grimes at ROHCG earlier in the year (which I missed through Covid), and, all in all, I was very much looking forward to hearing this.
And my expectations were more than fulfilled. Clayton is a singer, from the evidence of this performance, of an extraordinarily large range of vocal timbres and shades. Sone of his soft singing in songs like the final Organ-Grinder, the Linden Tree, Last Hope and the Phantom Suns was not only beautiful but, like all great singers, brought you intimately into his world, into his head. His soft singing was technically impressive too – no head notes/falsetto. At other times he could deaden the sound of his voice, as in The Crow. And yet, again, he could also sing in a strong declamatory style. He made you believe that there was one tortured character behind all these songs, not a string of mediocre poems in early Romantic mode set to often beautiful music being sung in a polite concert hall with beauty but little emotion. Some of the songs felt quite fast, some felt slow, but altogether the performance of the song cycle seemed to have a unified feel. The final song, The Organ Grinder, was as bleak or bleaker than I have ever heard it.
The concept behind this particular presentation of the work was two-fold:
- It was acted. Clayton ranged the stage, fell to the floor, huddled under the piano, glowered in the background, loomed in the shadows, leant against the walls. This felt absolutely right and helpful in bringing the audience into the world of the singer and manifesting his increasing madness. Clayton was very good at suggesting the different moods of the character – sometimes fearful, melancholy, stubborn, even at times self-mocking
- It also had scenery. This was less helpful – a series of impressive-in-their-own-right images picked by Paul Kildea, the creative director, pairing Schubert’s songs with hand-picked images of 20th-century Australian artist Fred Williams’ paintings and prints. The images were brilliantly colourful, clearly indicating the sun and natural life of Australia, but seemed to have only a tangential relationship with the Northern forests Schubert’s songs seem to be describing. Some of the images were apposite – e.g. the dark jewelled images for the graveyard song, or the dense yellow-reddishness of the Phantom suns. But often they seemed a distraction. It would have been better, I felt, to have had an acting platform for Clayton, a spotlight, white and black screens – this would have given more focus on Clayton’s performance without the distracting images.
I haven’t mentioned the pianist – I felt sometimes her phrasing at points was a little under-pointed, but that’s a taste thing, and she certainly didn’t distract from Clayton’s performance, and accompanied in a way that supported his singing. I did at the end wonder whether in an alternative staged version of the work directed by yours truly, the singer could actually treat the pianist as the loved one………
As a whole this was a tremendously impressive performance. There was an apology at the beginning for a throat infection the singer had, but there was no evidence of this
John's musical journey 