Wigmore Hall, London
28 & 30 March 2008
Alice Coote (mezzo)
Julius Drake (piano)
5 out of 5 stars: The Times
5 out of 5 stars: The Independent
“The emotional journey Coote undertook in this Winterreise, with pianist Julius Drake her equally intense and perceptive partner, was complex.” The Guardian
Franz Schubert: Winterreise
Click the photo for an interview with Alice Coote in the Times
What the critics say
Hilary Finch, The Times, 1 April 2008
5 out of 5 stars
The iconic figure of the lone Romantic wanderer traversing an icy landscape of the soul is invariably, whether in music or art, a male one. Few women choose to undertake the journey of Schubert’s Winterreise; but when they do, the songcycle can yield revelatory insight. Following in the snowy footprints of pioneers such as Lotte Lehmann, Christa Ludwig and Brigitte Fassbaender, Alice Coote has set her face to the elements and, with Julius Drake as her trusty and empathic companion at the piano, has created a Winterreise of searing musical strength.
Coote’s voice is now in its clearly focused prime, and never has this cycle seemed to lie so naturally within the mezzo-soprano range. At times the chest register bent under the burden of angst; and there were seconds of wavering intonation, as though the expressive weight of the words were almost too much for the human voice. But even this became part of the highly-strung nerve system of the whole: a whole that left its audience haunted and harrowed.
Coote’s performances always live near the edge. And, from the opening footfall, this traveller-persona seemed transfixed by trauma. Sudden bright flares flashed from the top of the voice, the memory of the lost lover was snarled out in recall, and, at the mention of ice, the voice stared out snow-blind from the melodic line.
When a man sings this cycle, its images – the weather-vane, the frozen river, the circling crow – seem projections of his subconscious emotional experience. In the voice of a woman, they become externalisations of something being experienced and explored deep inside. Coote’s journey worked its way through minute details of terror, ironic self-awareness, on through dream into the reawakening of a silent spring. Her body language – the pushing back of the hair, the staring eyes, the sometimes half-slumped position over the piano – incarnated the sheer effort of body and soul in an existential journey from which no traveller returns.
For the last four songs the voice seemed both to lose its physical will and to be reinventing its imagination to create a circling state of numbed wonder, beyond belief or disbelief.
Edward Seckerson, The Independent, Wednesday, 2 April 2008
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
When a singer of Alice Coote’s temperament and artistry embarks upon the disillusionment and heartbreak of Schubert’s “winter journey”, she defies and transcends gender. But can a woman access something more from a work that is essentially written within a masculine emotional framework? Is Winterreise, the world’s saddest song cycle, richer for that feminine “awareness”?
For sure, it felt as though Coote and her wonderful pianist Julius Drake were able to view the songs from the male and female perspective simultaneously, and that made for extraordinary inner tensions. We sensed this might be a special experience; just how special proved startling.
In her black, belted evening coat, Coote set off into this long, dark night of the soul with a full heart. Already the first song, “Good Night”, was rich in detail. The masculine rasp in the bottom of the voice brought icy blasts; “the shadow in the moonlight” passed over the second stanza in a phrase suddenly shaded to a whisper. And the unexpected modulation into the realms of dreams in the final stanza looked forward to delusions to come.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Coote’s performance was the way it teetered precariously ever closer to the edge of reason, and yet, in doing so, grew ever more lucid. The reassuring shade of “The Linden Tree” brought phrases of melting serenity, but the pain concealed beneath the calm surface was palpable, reflected in the rustlings of Drake’s pianistic restlessness. Remarkable, too, was the relationship of Coote’s character to the landscape of the songs, her departures into “white” sound as visual as they were suggestive of emotional numbness and fatigue.
Her physical and mental exhaustion was ours, too. But then, at the heart of the cycle, there was the “Dream of Spring”, in which Coote caught both the consolation and terrible irony: “Are you mocking the dreamer who saw flowers in winter?” In “In the Village”, the line “I’m finished with all dreaming” could almost have been the last word, so resigned was Coote to the heartbreak of its reality.
But “The Signpost” pointed towards the road from which there was no return, and not even Drake’s exquisite solace in the introduction to “The Inn” could deflect us from the cruel irony of the final songs. The emotional breakdown in the final stanza of “Phantom Suns” was such that I wondered if Coote could continue. But with “The Organ-Grinder” came confirmation that we were in the presence of a very special talent.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, Monday 31 March 2008
4 stars
Alice Coote is the latest female singer to boldly go where only a few women have gone before. Die Winterreise is considered a strictly male preserve – the protagonist of the 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller that Schubert sets is unequivocally a young man. But there is less gender-bending and suspension of disbelief required than when, say, a baritone sings Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and Coote was following in a distinguished line of sopranos and mezzos who have tackled the song-cycle with great success over the years.
In any case, those gender issues disappeared within seconds of her beginning the first song. It is hard to think of another singer who gives so much of herself to anything she sings in a lieder recital, living every bar and compelling the audience to go along with her. The emotional journey Coote undertook in this Winterreise, with pianist Julius Drake her equally intense and perceptive partner, was complex. It was not just a steady decline into dislocation and despair (though those states were visited en route), but one that took unexpected twists and turns, like a psychological thriller that made you genuinely want to know where the plot would go next.
The means she used to achieve this included a vast range of vocal colour and nuance. The result may have been a bit mannered for some tastes, and Schubert singing like this is not necessarily everyday fare. Occasionally, too, Coote’s dramatic effects threatened the coherence of a song, when things were pushed too far. But such moments were rare. The rest was spellbinding: a single, unbroken arc through the 80-minute cycle to an ending that was less the usual state of desolation than something far more disturbing, as if this had been a journey into sheer nothingness, with the emotional slate wiped clean.