5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The female equivalent of Peter Pears in Winterreise, December 31, 2005
This review is from: Schubert: Winterreise (Audio CD)
The famous Winterreise from Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten (Decca, 1963) captured a thrilling musical imaginaiton wedded to an aging, often strained voice. This 1988 version is the female equivalent. Christa Ludwig birngs a lifetime of musicality to bear. She lives these songs from the inside in a way that is only matched by the greatest Schubertians (Patzak, Hotter, Schwarzkopf, Ferrier, Quasthoff, and Pears), but like Pears her voice is aged, with a pronounced thoatiness and wobble.
These flaws are not as handicapping as in Pears's case, but then, Ludwig's interpretation is not as tragic as his, either. She was never the most searching lieder singer in her younger years (accepting her Mahler and Brahms), yet in this case Ludwig reaches as deep as she can--nothing is externalized or operatic. In every way this is a movingly sympathetic account, perhaps all the more in moments of strain, and James Levine accompanies superlatively, falling just shy of the peerless Britten. A treasure.
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