Should any doubts remain about the suitability of the female voice for undertaking Schubert's winter journey (and some, I suspect, do, after overhearing some depressing comments at Christa Ludwig's London recital), then this recording by Brigitte Fassbaender should clear them away once and for all.
Ludwig's DG recording convinced one by its deep interpretative seriousness, its negation of mere questions of gender in seeking out the expressive significance of every weight and measure of Schubert's line. No one could affirm the cycle's experience to be the exclusive property of either male or female; but Ludwig, like Gerhardt and Lehmann before her, was able to integrate animus and anima, if you like, into the register and expressive span of her own voice. Thus far, Fassbaender's experience is the same. But, as those who heard her Winterreise at Hohenems or the subsequent Wigmore Hall recital will know, there is also a marked difference in her approach, leaving the collector with two wonderfully distinct and distinguished documents of response.
Where Ludwig seems to hear the cycle's end in its beginning, and to experience its vicissitudes in the context of a knowledge of eventual karma, or of an underlying calmness of mind, all passion spent, Fassbaender has us travel with her through every shifting emotion of the journey. Renewed physical activity and hope are always possible here; the movement of finite life as well as the hope of infinity courses through her blood and her voice.
This is achieved primarily by an extraordinarily sentient awareness of every flicker of nerve and pulse in Schubert's line. Rarely in the history of this cycle has there been such a sense of freedom within the barline, such a subtle exploration of the fixed written note to re-create a heightened inflexion of natural speech, or a sudden fluctuation of hope, fear, regret or pain.
In the first song, for instance, it is not so much the tread of the footfall as the breathing of the entire body which is conveyed in its motion. Similarly, the movement of ''Die Wetterfahne'' becomes one with the erratic human pulse, quickened by that characteristic flaring light in Fassbaender's top register to a sense of palpable panic. Tempo relationships between songs are no less acutely felt: the sudden spurt of new energy at ''Tauschung'' is an obvious, but seldom perceived, possibility for evoking the ephemeral renewal of hope.
For ''Irrlicht'', Fassbaender coils the energy of one phrase into release for the next, creating a pall of sinister resignation which leads inevitably to ''Rast''. The nervous significance of a single rising and falling arpeggio is physically realized in ''Der greise Kopf'', while the artful re-creation of irregular and unpredictable movements in ''Letzte Hoffnung'', created by both fingers and voice, epitomizes the constantly revelatory partnership of Fassbaender and Aribert Reimann.
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