SCHUBERT: Winterreise, D. 911
Christian Gerhaher, baritone; Gerold Huber, piano
Arte Nova Lieder 74321 80777-2 [77:59]
There’s something to be said for the democratization of recorded music—that a young baritone and his collaborative pianist can make Schubert’s harrowing cycle available at super-budget price without embarrassment. But let’s not mistake accessibility for revelation.
Christian Gerhaher brings intelligence to this Winterreise, and a voice of considerable beauty. Round-toned, focused in the middle register, capable of dynamic shading that many younger singers haven’t yet mastered. He understands that world-weariness requires vocal color, not merely drooping tempos.
In “Die Wetterfahne” you hear the desperation barely contained beneath the surface—not hysterical, but palpable. “Rast” conveys genuine exhaustion, the kind that settles into bones. “Das Wirtshaus” achieves a sadness that doesn’t announce itself with exaggerated portamento or calculated sobbing.
His partner Gerold Huber deserves equal billing. Perhaps more. The piano writing in Winterreise can expose every miscalculation, every failure of imagination, and Huber navigates these perils with remarkable sensitivity.
Listen to how he weights the accompaniment in “Gefror’ne Tränen”—each chord placed with the care of someone arranging flowers on a grave. The tremolandi in “Einsamkeit” (so often rendered as mere melodrama) emerge here with genuine psychological disturbance. This is a pianist who has thought deeply about every bar.
Yet thinking deeply and penetrating to the work’s core are not the same thing. “Die Post” gets the tempo slightly wrong—not disastrously, but enough that the obsessive quality, that manic hope against hope, never quite materializes. The rhythmic impetus is there, certainly more convincing than Bär and Parsons managed in their thin-sounding 1988 production.
But I kept wanting Gerhaher to lean into the irony more savagely. “Der stürmische Morgen” gestures toward the storm without truly embodying it. One hears the idea of chaos rather than chaos itself.
And then there’s “Der Leiermann.”
The final test. Always. Huber’s hurdy-gurdy is well-characterized, properly mechanical, properly desolate.
Gerhaher sings with appropriate simplicity. Everything is… correct.
But where is the chill that should run down the spine? Where is the recognition that we’ve arrived at a destination worse than death—at complete, annihilating indifference? I’ve sat through this song with Fischer-Dieskau and — well — Moore (their 1971 DG recording still sounds extraordinary) and felt the bottom drop out of the world.
With Schreier and Richter on Philips, the bleakness becomes almost unbearable—you understand why people speak of this cycle as musical suicide. And Hotter with Moore in 1955, that black voice emptying itself of everything… well, that’s simply on another plane of existence.
Gerhaher and — well — Huber give us a good Winterreise. Musically literate, emotionally engaged, technically accomplished. But Schubert’s final journey demands more than competence, more than beauty, more than intelligence.
It demands that performers risk something essential of themselves. This recording, for all its virtues, plays it too safe. The wanderer here suffers elegantly.
Schubert’s wanderer suffers absolutely. The super-budget price makes this an acceptable introduction to the cycle—certainly preferable to several higher-priced alternatives I could name. But those who know this music — who have lived with it, will return to the old masters.
Some territories can’t be conquered with mere skill. Recommended with reservations
