More or less by chance, when at the Wigmore Hall earlier this week, I acquired a couple of tickets for a rendering of the 'Winterreise' offered by Messrs. Boesch and Vignoles. At row five a bit nearer the front than I usually care to be, but in a case such as this when one is down to the odd returns, one cannot be fussy.
It turned out to be a very good concert indeed. It was perhaps the third time I have heard the Winterreise live, but the first time that I went in for the words in a serious way, prompted in part by the discovery that the music was built around a sequence of poems which may have been written for just such a purpose. I took some pages from the booklet which came with my Pears & Britten recording, artfully folded for the purpose, to find that the Wigmore Hall, unlike the QEH (see 6th December), did believe in printing the words, German & English in parallel, in the programme. Complete with little notes asking one to take care about turning the pages. There was a slight extra charge with the programme being £4 rather than the usual £2.50 or £3.
The singer had a very pleasing & expressive style, far more so than I remember from previous performances, really getting into the rôle, rather than just singing someone else's words, which made one want to watch, but which did not sit well with trying to follow the words, and which may have meant that my head was bobbing up and down in a way which might have been rather irritating for the person sitting behind me had I not, luckily, been sitting in an aisle seat, the aisle seat meaning that I was not in anyone's line of sight. There have been experiments with electronic displays for drama and opera, but I think that this would be a bit intrusive in this context and I guess the answer is to get to know the songs well enough that a prompt for the name of the song would suffice. One could then concentrate on the performers and their performance, without the distraction of bobbing up and down.
One can also discuss the merits of interval or not. I think the fashion at present is not to have an interval, which apart from not breaking the mood or the flow, means that one gets away a little quicker, which is a consideration these days. (We had no interval yesterday). On the other hand, one can overdo the arguments about the integrity of the 24 song cycle as the music if not the poems was certainly written in two 12 song chunks. And even if the poems were first published as a single cycle, that does not tell one all that much. Who knows what the circumstances of creation were? Who knows whether the grouping into 24 poems was any more than a marketing device by the publisher? There is also the point that an interval provides a comfort break for us older members of the audience.
As ever, I was very taken with the piano half of this recital, with Vignoles bringing an unexpected warmth to the accompaniment, nicely contrasting with the bleakness of the poems.
And, despite initial doubts, I was very taken with sitting fairly near the front. I am sure that I would have missed a lot sitting my usual 15-20 rows back. But I am still not sure that the same would be true with, for example, a string quartet. For that one needs a bit of space for the music to blend in.
The journey home unaffected by frost or snow, despite SWT's performance a few weeks' ago, and was only marred by my sitting too close to three jolly middle aged drunks who had clearly been having a very good time in the big town. The catch was that while they were not becoming difficult, their humour had become tiresomely infantile - and I was too tired or too lazy to move at that point.
PS: I was even moved to think that it would be nice to be able to read the poems in the original German, where the possibilities for expression looked rather different to those in our own English. But it is not going to be. Can't afford the quality time which would be needed to make such an endeavour worth while.
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