Schubert’s song-cycle
Winterreise, to poems by Wilhelm
Müller, tells the story of a man’s
rejection, disintegration and ultimate
alienation. A tradition, or at least
an assumption has grown up that this
is, shall we say, an older singer’s
cycle. There was, for example, a great
kerfuffle years ago when an ageing Hans
Hotter produced his recording – rightly
so because it was superb. Yet Schubert
was a mere thirty-two years old when
he composed these incomparably great
songs, and Müller was just twenty-seven
when he published the poems.
What then of this recording
by the distinguished German baritone
Ralph Kohn? It has proved remarkably
difficult to establish exactly how old
Dr. Kohn is! He is undoubtedly a remarkable
individual, having made his career in
business in the UK, being the first
recipient of the Queen’s Award for Export
Achievement. But it would be wrong to
suggest that music has been a ‘hobby’;
he has studied widely, given recitals
in many of the world’s most important
venues, and has recorded quite extensively.
He is accompanied here by that fine
musician Graham Johnson, who brings
his customary elegance and poetry to
the piano parts of the songs.
I confess that this
is easily the ‘straightest’ interpretation
of Schubert that I have ever encountered
– it’s the performance equivalent of
an Urtext, if such a thing is conceivable.
Kohn is scrupulously accurate with all
the rhythmic patterns, and eschews any
but the very slightest rubato. This
is a very ‘Classical’ reading of what
is a quintessentially Romantic piece.
I applaud the desire to give us the
music ‘as the composer wrote it’; but
the paradox is that one knows that Schubert
would have expected freedom and flexibility
from his performers, so that an ‘accurate’
performance is inevitably an unstylish
one. Despite the honesty and sincerity
of Kohn’s singing, there is a whole
dimension of experience entirely missing.
To take one example; I cannot understand
how a singer can fail to react (audibly)
to the change to the major key for the
last verse of ‘Gute nacht’ (‘Good
Night'). Kohn sings on, but nothing
happens. Later, a pathetic final
act of defiance rings out in the twenty-second
song, ‘Mut’ (‘Courage’), yet
Kohn is stolid, mildly combative. This
absence of any kind of imaginative response
in places like this (and there are many
of them) is ultimately deeply frustrating,
and makes you ask yourself what Kohn’s
motivation is for singing the songs
at all.
He has clearly had
a respectable voice, if not a special
one. His intonation is usually clean
and accurate but it is now well past
its best, and many of the songs find
him cruelly exposed. The only way to
really enjoy this CD is to listen closely
to Johnson’s wonderful playing – the
rest is silence, or perhaps should have
been.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
Ralph Kohn (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano)
