Holywell Music Room, Oxford Lieder Festival

11 October 2004

Mark Padmore (Tenor)
Julius Drake (Piano)

“…a gripping partnership” The Times

Franz Schubert: Die Winterreise

What the critics say

Hilary Finch, The Times, 14 October 2004

SCHUBERT’S great cycle Winterreise has become the designer-chic of song: everyone has to perform this great winter journey of the soul, Schubert at his most visionary and revolutionary. They have to record it and, if at all possible, stage it and dance it as well. And, with names like Ian Bostridge, Matthias Goerne and Simon Keenlyside currently dominating proceedings, it seems we just can’t get enough of it.

But, away from the chart-topping spotlight, there are also seeds which have been growing secretly. Mark Padmore’s Winterreise is one of them. The tenor who made his name in Baroque opera and as a highly sought-after Evangelist in Bach’s Passions has shrewdly been saving himself for Lieder until the voice and the time was ripe.

The enterprising Oxford Lieder Festival, now in its third year, provided just the opportunity. Its two weeks of song and chamber music, devised by the young accompanist Sholto Kynoch, draws capacity audiences to the Holywell Music Room, an ideally intimate Oxford venue patronised by Handel, Haydn and Mozart, no less.

Schubert described Winterreise as a cycle of spine-chilling songs. And, long before the end of Padmore’s performance, the temperature within the hallowed circle of the 18th-century recital room seemed to plummet, despite the Holywell’s notorious hot-water pipes. The silent and minutely attentive audience seemed frozen to their seats, and it was some few moments before the long applause began.

Without any of the stark verbal shock tactics or obvious vocal virtuosity of some of his contemporaries and colleagues, Padmore almost imperceptibly set up, then cannily sustained, an extraordinary tension throughout the cycle.

While Julius Drake provided the scenic stage-management and nudged emotional response in his piano accompaniment (and how graphic were his postludes, how eloquent even his final chords), Padmore focused on the shape and long-sighted inflection of melody. When allied to some resilient crescendos of anger and some beautifully controlled numbed half-voice of resignation and despair, this made for a gripping partnership.

Both singer and pianist had a mature measure of the cycle’s ebb and flow, its thaws and freezings, its stasis and relentless momentum. This was only Padmore’s second Winterreise: his journey looks set to be a long and remarkable one.

Andrew Clements,The Guardian, Wednesday 13 October 2004

4 stars

The Oxford Lieder festival, a fortnight of concerts and talks, is now three years old. Schubert and Schumann dominated the first two festivals, and so, this year, the feature has switched to the songs of the third member of the fellowship of the 19th-century Lied, Brahms. The programmes are presented by a carefully balanced mixture of young, upwardly mobile artists and experienced recitalists and accompanists. There are appearances by Lisa Milne, James Gilchrist, Ian Partridge and Geraldine McGreevy, with pianists including Malcolm Martineau and Graham Johnson, as well as the pairing that brought Schubert’s Die Winterreise to the second night of the festival, Mark Padmore and Julius Drake.

The very first performance of Winterreise, at the house in which Schubert was lodging in March 1825, was a private concert with the composer playing the piano, and the Holywell Music Room, in which Padmore and Drake gave their compelling account, is probably not that much larger. It felt like an intimate gathering; there was an arresting vividness in the way each song was projected, with both singer and pianist keenly aware that the smallest inflection would register with everyone in the audience.

Padmore is a wonderfully accomplished artist, even and pure of tone, always intensely musical and consistently imaginative in the way he colours each phrase. But he and Drake always took the long view, carefully mapping the emotional trajectory of the cycle as a whole and clearly identifying its emotional turning points – placing the first great crisis in the anguished sections of the seventh number, Auf Dem Flusse, for instance – without ever forgetting that these are art songs, and not operatic arias. Drake constantly filled out the psychological background – his punctuations to Frühlingstraum were positively explosive – so that there was a perfect balance between what the singer and the accompanist were doing, and the listener was naturally guided between the two, as all great lieder performances should do.