Roderick Williams hit on the idea of creating an English song equivalent to Winterreise when studying Schubert’s iconic song cycle a decade ago. Since then, he’s refined his playlist, adding and subtracting until finally arriving at the intriguing programme presented here. It’s an enthralling conceit that more than holds water over an hour and a half, especially in the hands of such a lithe-toned and instinctual storyteller.
Some connections were straightforward. Vaughan Williams’ The Vagabond is driven by the same dogged tread as Winterreise’s Good Night, while the flurry of chords that propel Quilter’s Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind mimic Schubert’s madly spinning Weathervane. The arboreal imagery and homespun melody of Linden Lea, here given in a gently burring Dorset dialect, is a musical doppelganger for the similarly folksy Linden Tree.
Others were more subtle, though just as effective. Schubert’s Will-o-the-Wisp was mirrored by Ina Boyle’s A Song of Enchantment (one of several delightful discoveries here). Winterreise’s 19th-century mail coach found an echo in Britten’s Midnight on the Great Western. Later, an ominous crow found itself translated into an ambiguous angel and Schubert’s Inn – itself a metaphor for a graveyard – became the literal cemetery of Finzi’s In a Churchyard.
There was one striking difference. Where Schubert’s tortured protagonist is leaving behind him a relationship only recently gone awry, Williams’ reworking is more often concerned with long lost loves and the irrevocable passage of time. Was that a problem? Not at all, though it lent this newly curated English song cycle a deeper melancholy than the original, which feels more youthfully resolute.
Williams proved the ideal guide to this repertoire, his phrasing, dramatic physicality and illuminating way with the text bringing fresh insights to old favourites. Take, for example, the loneliness and loss dredged up in Finzi’s At Middle-Field Gate in February, or the layers revealed in the singer’s own masterly setting of Blake’s The Angel. He was aided and abetted throughout by Christopher Glynn’s poised and poetic piano playing, the two musicians’ synergy nowhere more penetrating than in Britten’s account of Hardy’s listless lad on his solitary train journey. Chilling stuff.
