Saturday, August 17, 2024

A “Historically Informed” Schubert Song Cycle

Cover of the album being discussed, whose design is not particularly “historically informed!” (from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed)

I suspect that there are more recordings of Franz Schubert’s D. 795 song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (the fair maid of the mill) than I would care to enumerate. (My wife, who classifies this as woe-is-me music, thinks that one is too many!) Nevertheless, my interest in “historically informed performance” led me to a new harmonia mundi album, which will be released this coming Friday. As is often the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page, which is processing pre-orders.

Tenor Julian Prégardien is accompanied at the keyboard by Kristian Bezuidenhout. Bezuidenhout is probably no stranger to San Francisco readers interested in historically informed performances. When he last visited Philharmonia Baroque in March of 2023 as soloist in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 466 piano concerto in D minor, his instrument was Music Director Nicholas McGegan’s own fortepiano! This had been built by Thomas and Barbara Wolf following the design of an instrument built around 1780 by Wenzel Schantz.

Bezuidenhout’s instrument for Schubert has a somewhat similar pedigree. This fortepiano was made in 2019 by Christoph Kern. However, this was again based on the “historically informed” design of an instrument made by Conrad Graf in 1825. The instrument has a capacity for a unique diversity of timbres. This allowed Bezuidenhout to support the prodigious array of dispositions that arise in the twenty poems by Wilhelm Müller that Schubert selected for his D. 795. I found that the scope of the musical account of those dispositions was more than sufficient to transcend my wife’s woe-is-me complaint!

There are those that shy away from “historically informed” sonorities because they are not expressive enough; but, as far as I am concerned, they allow the skilled performers to summon up subtleties that make the account more expressive!

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