Forum Opera reviews Matthias Goerne and Leif Ove Andsnes’ Schubert cycle in Paris
“We often think that we have already seen and heard everything about Die Schöne Müllerin. The constellation of interpretations and recording is dizzying and offers so many different styles. Yet the magic of the concert is precisely to offer each evening a new interpretation of the work … Under the vast sky of Schubert’s music, Matthias Goerne and Leif Ove Andsnes describe the flowers, streams and forests of the lonely miller with simplicity and maturity.
“In “Das Wandern”, one senses the baritone still testing the scene … This does not prevent impressive figuralisms in the piano part (though not inventive at first). The water, the stones, the wheels of the mill … all these elements require an attack and each time different articulation, which the pianist performs wonderfully. After a “Wohin? “Resounding from a waddled ravine, it is” Der Neugierige “which offers the next musical jewel of the evening. While relaxing and restraining, the breathing of an entire room is suspended from the lips of Goerne, each word of which reaches us with irreproachable clarity.
“… There is a dialogue between the miller and the brook (“Der Müller und der Bach”) with ghostly aspects. We then plan in a carefully mastered in-between, which makes waiting between this one and the last piece all the more weighty. In this ultimate lullaby of the stream (“Des Baches Wiegenlied”), all the emotions that we had lived during the previous hour disappear little by little. The play of the pianist is reduced to the strictly essential, the voice of the baritone thins, everything converges towards a universe or only the text remains. It will take thirty seconds of waiting to the public to express his enthusiasm, the contemplation of the “immensely great sky” being something better not to be disturbed.”
Source: Forum Opera