Schubert: Winterreise (SACD) – Peter Mattei

Composer: Franz Schubert
Artists: Peter Mattei, Lars David Nilsson
Number of Discs: 1
Label: BIS
Release Date: September 6, 2019

Peter Mattei has won great acclaim as a singer with unusual dramatic gifts, appearing on the world’s leading stages in complex operatic roles such as Don Giovanni, Billy Budd, and Eugene Onegin. On the present release he takes on a no less complex character in the Lieder canon: the traveler in Schubert’s Winterreise. 

For this song cycle, Schubert returned to the poet Wilhelm Müller, whose poems he had set some years earlier in Die schöne Müllerin. Müller’s texts revolve around a young man who, after being rejected, leaves his village and heads into the desolate, snowy countryside. In the course of the cycle, he experiences loss and an aching loneliness interrupted by fleeting glimpses of hope, but ultimately the landscape of his journey is colored by alienation and despair. 

Müller died at 32 years old in 1827, the very year in which Winterreise was composed, and Schubert himself died the following year, still revising the last of the songs from his deathbed. The composer invited his closest friends to a gathering to listen to the cycle, and according to one witness, the audience was shocked by the songs’ somber mood. 

In this recording, Mattei brings all his interpretive skills to bear. He is supported by Lars David Nilsson’s piano, which reinforces the different moods and characters of the 24 songs and often assumes the role of a narrator, alongside the singer.
 

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