Winterreise

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès give us the Winterreise. The former we hear from time to time, but the record suggests that we had never heard Adès before - I did not even know that he was a successful composer until after event, when I looked him up.

As it turned out a windy evening, with some rain.

Annoyed by a talkative girl in the train, a girl who would have been nice enough looking if she had more dress sense (or perhaps one should say trouser sense, with her sporting some rather garish purple trousers), but who did not seem to draw breath for talking until she got off at Wimbledon or so. Not quite loud enough to hear much of what she was saying, but quite loud enough to be intrusive and irritating. There must have been something about her particular voice, because the chattering of some ladies, otherwise much the same, is not always irritating.

The tube seemed very hot and it was a relief to get out at Oxford Circus to make our way to Cavendish Square for our picnic. Where, with the evenings drawing in, we only just finished before the locking-up man made his rounds.

The performance was being recorded, which meant we had a cluster of microphones hanging down from above and a couple in front of the singer - a singer who spent a lot of his time with his chin well down, looking from where we sat as if he were talking to the two microphones. We shall never know whether this was indeed the case.

A very attentive pianist, who turned the pages of his own music (Bostridge managed without) and who kept a very careful eye on his singer, only letting himself go a bit in his more colourful passages.

Bostridge put in a very stagey performance, very expressive with a lot of movement. A tendency, for example, to bounce up and down in time to the opening bars of the accompaniment, while he was waiting for his entry. Some digging of fingers into the palms of his hands. I was very struck with how close it all was to acting, how he was turning in a performance of a role, something which, up to a point anyway, he could turn on and off as if it were a tap. Faking, even. Something made obvious by there being words, but I suppose it is much the same for any intense musical performance. Performance of something which has a prior existence, was not being made up on the spot, for the occasion. Perhaps not the back of the second violins in an orchestra, but certainly the second violin in a string quartet.

I had my now usual trouble deciding what to do with the words. I tried following them for the first couple of songs, but decided - once again - that I was missing too much by not watching the action. Hopefully, if we keep on coming, the words will somehow sink in and I will start to get something more like full measure. I sometimes think I should take the trouble to memorise them, but I rarely think that that is actually going to happen.

But I did get enough of the words to think that they were very male words. Perhaps if I did memorise them, I would no longer care for the female version. See reference 2.

All in all, a fine performance. Although not good enough for some people behind us, who did not think much of the rendering of the last song of the cycle. While I think that sometimes it is quite an advantage to be easy to please in these matters and I often wonder how much professional consumers of art - critics and their kind - lose by excess of knowledge.

Just caught the late running 2123 at Vauxhall which was good but once on-board completely flummoxed by a complete change of format of the calendar on my telephone. Not unusable, but a complete change which took some minutes to get the hand of. Fortunately, by the next morning, Microsoft had thought better of it and the calendar had reverted to its original condition. This in the context of deciding not to go to Oxford to hear a bass version of the Winterreise in a couple of weeks time from Messrs. Holl & Johnson. Maybe if we had been going there anyway, but as it was, far too much time and expense given that we have plenty of music here in London, on the spot as it were.

At home, BH told me that the song she liked the least was the 16th out of the 24, Letzte Hoffnung, the last hope. A rather jagged affair, rather unsettling, which Bostridge in his book (reference 3) sets against of contemporary interest in probability and chance. He also points up something which it is easy to lose sight of, so far from the time and place where the songs were written, the ambiguity as to whether we are on the outside looking in, the inside looking out - or what? The element of irony and ridicule hanging over the whole business.

PS: we speculated afterwards how many Winterreise's Bostridge had done in his 30 years or so on the boards. Our guess was around 150, once every couple of months or so. Our guess also was that Bostridge kept a diary of them, so at least he knows.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/05/winterreises-old-and-new.html. We do not seem to heard Bostridge do the Winterreise before, with this staged version appearing to be the nearest thing, rather more than two years ago.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/winterreise.html. The most recent Winterreise, a female one, getting on for a couple of months ago.

Reference 3: Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession - Bostridge - 2015.