Released to mark the 25th anniversary of the premiere, this new recording of Hans Zender’s ‘composed interpretation’ of Winterreise marks Julian Prégardien’s debut on the Alpha label, for which he signed earlier this year. It derives from a live performance by the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, of which Zender himself was chief conductor from 1972 to 1984. Prégardien is also following in the footsteps of his father Christoph, whose own recording of the work, with Klangforum Wien under Sylvain Cambreling, was issued in 2000. The score itself, meanwhile, has long divided opinion, and like others who have written about it in these pages I confess both to admiring it and questioning its necessity.

In a booklet note, Zender describes Winterreise as a ‘secular Passion’ that ‘articulates loneliness for the first time in modernity’, and his interpretation surveys Schubert’s song-cycle in terms of the 19th- and 20th-century Expressionism, of which it is the perceived starting point. Schubert is consequently refracted through Mahler and the Second Viennese School, whose Klangfarbenmelodien colour Zender’s constantly shifting textures, while the presence of accordion, guitar and saxophone suggest the influence of Weimar Republic cabaret.

As the cycle progresses, the songs are increasingly pulled in and out of focus by means of augmentation and diminution, or by harmonic and rhythmic reconfigurations, as the vocal line slips in and out of Sprechgesang. Some of it is disarmingly literal, and we really seem to hear the wind, the cracking ice and the percussive creak of roofs under the weight of snow. Some of Zender’s interventions, however, can seem too knowing. Mahlerian brass and woodwind, echoing through space, turn existential loneliness into cosmic isolation. The accompaniment to ‘Das Wirtshaus’ becomes a formal funeral hymn played by a wind band. Whether any of it adds anything to our understanding of Schubert remains very much a matter for debate.

You can’t fault the performance, though. Conductor Robert Reimer pitches the work somewhere between Cambreling’s reflectiveness and the more abrasive approach of Zender’s own 1995 recording with Hans-Peter Blochwitz and the Ensemble Modern. Speeds are swift and urgent, fitting the work on to a single disc where it previously needed two, though nothing feels rushed. The playing is exemplary, and the beautifully balanced recording allows every textural and colouristic shift to register. Apart from a couple of moments of constriction at the top, Prégardien sings with wonderful elegance and unforced sincerity of expression, which makes his swerves into Sprechgesang all the more shocking. He’s a lighter-voiced, more impulsive protagonist than his father, and altogether more lyrical than Blochwitz, who is inclined to be declamatory. You might have qualms about the work itself but it’s hard to imagine it more compellingly done.