Ian Bostridge paired up with Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes last year to give us an arresting performance of Schubert's Winterreise. Now he is joined by Japanese Mitsuko Uchida in an inspired account of the composer's Die schone Mullerin.
This cycle of songs must have one of the most poetically
maligned of all texts, but Bostridge, in his booklet essay, defends Mullerin as one of the central works of the European tradition, plumbing psychoanalytic depths and speaking of sex and death in a way few other works manage.
Clearly, Wilhelm Muller's poems meant more to Schubert than the opportunity to show a young miller unlucky in love and discussing it with a babbling brook.
Ten years after his first recording of this work for Hyperion, the English tenor is more resolute in tone. He strides through the opening Das Wandern, while Uchida does wonders with one of Schubert's least promising accompaniments. He gives his all to those yodelling quavers in Mein and yet his treatment of the more reflective songs, such as Der Neugierige, is awe-inspiring in its delicacy.
Occasionally, Bostridge drifts into mannerism. The second song, Wohin, is too deliberated for my taste and that discreet shout in Die bose Farbe , where the miller is gazing at his beloved's unattainable window, seems unnecessary.
And some might prefer the fuller tone of a Wunderlich or Goerne in a song like Ungeduld.
Uchida is a peerless Schubertian in her own right and it is a pleasure to focus on her lovely, considered pianism. There is no one quite like her, whether lending such exquisite nuances to the opening four bars of Morgengruss or letting a crescendo swell like a summer storm in Trockne Blumen.
The album's striking cover is a timely tribute to photographer Richard Avedon, who died last October. Avedon's two cover portraits of the musicians - coy and inviting on the front, lost in their own ecstatic dreamworld on the back - in elegant monochrome, could well sell this CD by themselves.
* Schubert, Die schone Mullerin (EMI 57827)
