But there are drawbacks: the sea of heads bent down reading the song texts and not watching the singer’s expressive face. Pianist Gary Matthewman has experimented, with some success, with projecting the text. We might say “lieder with surtitles” with horror, but I thought the experiment worked very well.
Sams’s translations were commissioned by Glynn and the Ryedale Festival and performed there and at London’s Wigmore Hall. I did not hear Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn perform “Winter Journey” live, alas, but I did manage to catch John Tomlinson and Christopher Glynn performing “Swan Song” and was struck by the change in communicability that moving to English made.
The translations by Jeremy Sams have achieved a nice combination of approachability, singability, directness, and poetry. In listening to Roderick Williams performing “Winter Journey,” it is remarkable how much being able to understand every word transforms the experience. It shouldn’t really. After all, most of us know what “Winterreise” is about and what happens in each of the songs. But hearing music and words and comprehending both transforms the songs back into sung poetry.
There is the narrative detail, of course, the way the verbal and musical gestures mesh. But there is also the sense of a wider journey, the feeling that this really is an interconnected story, not just 24 episodes. And, of course, Roderick Williams is a superb storyteller.
Both Glynn and Williams give a very thoughtful, considered performance that is fluidly narrative. As you might expect, Williams is a well-balanced and well-modulated protagonist, mellifluously and thoughtfully sung. Instead of being overwrought, Williams creates the sense of an ordinary everyman laid low, with puzzlement and bleakness gradually taking over.
I cannot think of a more beautifully sung account of this cycle, but that is only part of the story because story it is. Williams uses his voice, in all its flexibility, to create a profoundly moving tale of a man’s journey. He uses a lot more voice than Plunket Green (but is significantly younger!), yet there is still a similar emphasis on the expressiveness of the text. And “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” is a wonderfully eerie and disturbing end to the powerful story of a journey.
This is an amazing disc, not the “Winterreise” to end all “Winterreises,” but an essential complement to them. I gather that Glynn and Signum have recordings of the other two cycles up their sleeve, which is good news indeed.
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