Customer Reviews

Schubert: Winterreise

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Christoph Prégardien's Winterreise is the one to own. He sings with great feeling - all the emotions are here - sadness, love, anger, despair, resignation, regret, bitterness, hope and hopelessness. Prégardien uses the different registers of his voice with great skill and he blends head voice, falsetto and chest voices with great skill, but he allows the different colours to come out and bring great expressiveness to the music.

Andreas Staier is an excellent fortepianist and he brings great skill and wisdom to his performance. The instrument used, like Christoph Prégardien's voice, has a great range of colour and expressiveness.

This is a nearly perfect recording. It is one of the most perfect recordings of music on CD I have ever heard and it is a treasured part of my collection.

I recommend this disc to all.

My daughter made me a gift of this recording and all I can say is: What a wonderful, marvelous interpretation and recording! What a glorious singer! What a perfect pianist! This deserves more than 5 stars! Highly reccomended!

Composers like Mozart, Haydn or Schubert were not having in mind a 20th century Steinway when they wrote their pieces. It is true that the modern piano is far more expressive than a fortepiano, but the gain is a selfish one, for it suffices to hear Mozart's Piano Concertos in modern and period instruments to realize that the work loses as a whole. What is true for Mozart is no less true for Schubert, and period instruments performances render more delicately the composer's orginal message. This however does not justify bad playing, and this performance is impeccable.

This is really a fantastic version of "die Winterreise", Prégardien has got a really fresh, vivid and moving voice. But why do performers go on using these tremendous pianoforte instead of usual pianos. These old instruments sound just like old disaccorded pub pianos. When you think of Schubert's (and Schumann's, Chopin's, Liszt's) frustration, at his time, in front of the pianoforte's limits, you can't figure out that present performers don't take all the advantages, the dynamism, the wider interpretative range that the modern piano offers. But still, this is a very very good version.

the period instrument watchdogs descend whenever somebody points out that the foretepiano is tinkly and underpowered compared to a modern piano, and the loss of expressivity is especially harmful here, becasue Christoph Pregardien acquits himself so well in the vocal part. He has lingered on the edge of fame for a long time and is basically known to lieder fans, like the baritone Wolfgang Holzmeier, with whom he shares a smooth, creamy tone, middle-of-the-road instincts, and a certain lack of emotional depth. Even so, Pregardien sounds gorgeous here, and without finding any song deeply memorable, I enjoyed the performance as a whole. The accompanist, Andreas Staier, is quite accomplished on the fortepiano and handles its limitations well; however, he doesn't seem to have any particular insights--or maybe the "pub piano" sound diminishes them.