Financial Times
"When combined with the accordion-soaked growls of the Britten Sinfonia under Baldur Brönnimann, the effect is rarely less than chilling."
Read MoreThe Dark Mirror: Zender’s Winterreise
London
12 – 14 May 2016
Schubert arr. Hans Zender
Winterreise
Artists
Summary
A wanderer journeys through a winter landscape, his reflections on the meaning of life alternating between angst and nostalgia, sardonic humour and depressive longing.
Loss of love is just the beginning of Schubert’s haunting song cycle, reinterpreted with Hans Zender’s colourful orchestration to evoke the cabaret style of post-Weimar Germany, and adapted for the stage in this theatrical production.
Netia Jones approaches her multimedia work like a painting, integrating video, projections and traditional design into live music performances. She collaborates with Ian Bostridge – who has performed Winterreise more than a hundred times – and Britten Sinfonia, using multilayered imagery to realise a monochrome world of shadow and light.
Reviews
The Observer
"So strong is Schubert’s music, so direct is Müller’s verse and so finely intelligent is Bostridge’s singing that all peril is overcome and art gains."
Read MoreThe Arts Desk
"His reworking goes far beyond mere orchestration, stretching some passages out of shape, denaturing their sounds into hollow wooden and metallic noises, colouring others so richly and specifically that they take on an entirely new character from their originals."
Read MoreThe Telegraph
"Without a hint of kitsch, it doesn’t so much magnify as intensify Schubert’s vision, leaving its basic shape and text unaltered, but adding colours, sonorities, repetitions, pauses and emphases that build an atmosphere of dislocation and alienation"
Read MoreThe Guardian
"At the centre of it, too, is Bostridge’s impeccably coloured performance, his articulation of every morsel of the text utterly lucid, even when, in Zender’s version, it has to be spoken or delivered as Sprechgesang."
Read MoreThe Times
"Bostridge twisted like the ghoulish subject of a George Grosz painting, his face as white as bone, his eyes and voice sour with malice and irony."
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