LF 26: Winterreise
Dirleton Kirk, 17/9/2026
Nicholas Mulroy (tenor), Jeremy Denk (piano)
The afternoon concert of 17th September at this year’s Lammermuir Festival was at the picturesque venue of Dirleton Kirk, a venue of life-affirming verdance and vitality, elevating mood and sense of wellbeing and connectedness with the world. A delicious and poignant contrast, then, with the programme, ‘Winterreise’, Schubert’s bleak Winter’s Journey, metaphorically through a chill wintry landscape, but actually and more chillingly through a morbid psyche, alienated from the world: a journey to the grave. Our guides for this grim odyssey were tenor Nicholas Mulroy and pianist Jeremy Denk.
Throughout the Festival, the programme notes have been uniformly excellent, and for this recital, the programme was a booklet with a particularly fine essay by David Lee on the song cycle. It was followed by a section labelled “Texts & Translations”. Disappointingly, the German text was actually not provided, while the excellent English translations unfortunately omitted the ninth song ‘Irrlicht’ (Will-o'-the-wisp).
There is a semblance of narrative in Müller’s poems. A young man is disillusioned, believing himself deceived by the girl he loves and her family. He eschews human company and embarks on a solitary journey, keeping to the fringes of society, eyeing it balefully from the sidelines. Any short-lived apparent lightening of the mood turns to self-mocking. For Schubert, who was ill and knew he was dying of syphilis, the poems offered an opportunity for autobiographic candour. Where the finale of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet dances a macabre tarantella as if life could be prolonged by refusing to stop dancing, ‘Winterreise’ eschews bluff denial and numbly surrenders to the inevitable. That much is already in the poems. But Schubert finds something new in ‘Winterreise’. The dialogue between voice and piano becomes a seamless internal monologue. We eavesdrop, not on a conversation, but on the innermost thoughts of an unhappy man as the will to live drains away. It is the honesty, though painful, that is cathartic.
‘Winterreise’ deserves performers who can match Schubert’s candour with unity of vision, empathic artistic integrity and a determination to find and reveal the truth that lies within the perfect combination of words and music that Schubert has left us. Last year’s East Neuk Festival included a ‘Winterreise’ which left me in no doubt that tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Joseph Middleton are such a combination. I have no hesitation in adding now that so are Nicholas Mulroy and Jeremy Denk. If anything, more so.
Last year at the East Neuk, which also included performances of the other cycles, including ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ from baritone James Newby, I confronted an ‘elephant in the room’ with the following:
“If you have a tenor and a baritone and you are going to programme one cycle about the woes of a naïve youth and a darker one about the morbid decline of a self-imposed outcast, don’t the tessiture suggest ‘casting’ vice versa, with the baritone as the tortured soul and the lighter tenor as the youth? Well, before these two concerts, I would probably have concurred. But after? Let’s just say that’s one purist crusade I won’t be joining. Even though my yardstick recording of ‘Winterreise’ has always been baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.” I can happily echo that sentiment.
“What an odd review; no description of the performance”. Well, I have described what the listener must experience and confirmed that I experienced it. As to the mechanics of execution, Nicholas Mulroy’s German diction is flawless and he has a palette of tone at his disposal to trace the decline of the protagonist unfolding through the cycle. Similarly, Jeremy Denk, as evinced in his performances of Mozart concertos at the Festival, possesses flawless articulation and a facility with phrasing that draws the listener into the music as intimately as breathing. But there was nothing mechanical about what I experienced. What I experienced was sublime and unforgettable.
Weblink: https://www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk/event/winterreise/