A century ago, and blessed with the same rich vocal endowments, a singer such as Gerald Finley might have been content to offer a more purely beautiful and stoic rendering of Schubert's Winterreise than the Canadian bass-baritone did in this Wigmore recital. But today's way with Schubert's dark journey of the soul is very different from that of our grandparents' era.
In these more emotionally confessional times, singers tend to probe more uninhibitedly than their predecessors did into the psychological disintegration of the protagonist through the 24 songs that make up the cycle. Outstanding recent London performances of Winterreise by singers such as Alice Coote and Ian Bostridge have embodied this more theatrical approach. And so it was here, with Finley and his responsive accompanist, Julius Drake.
Finley can, of course, produce an even and lovely baritone sound when he chooses to. There were classic moments of sustained vocal phrasing and artistry in songs such as The Crow and Last Hope. But cumulatively, Finley's journey offered a truly harrowing account of things falling apart. The emphasis, signalled right from the opening song, was on what is going on in the poet's mind, rather than responses to the external world, let alone an art-song approach.
Finley and Drake nevertheless let the mood darken slowly and subtly. It was not until the eighth song, A Backward Glance, that the full intensity of the poet's despair was let off the rein. After that, the sense of crisis took different forms but rarely relaxed. Even the Promethean moment of defiance in Courage, which can sometimes signal that the protagonist is going down fighting, seemed without hope. Infinitesimal variations in Finley's pitch, not always intentional perhaps, added to the edginess that marked this account, especially in the middle of the voice. As the cycle developed, Drake's accompaniments acquired a similar sense of fragility and restlessness, too, never more so than in the penultimate song, Phantom Suns.
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