Daniel Beskow | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Johannes Held (baritone), Daniel Beskow (piano)

“Schubert’s Winterreise was present for both of us very early in our lives. Daniel keeps telling me how he sat at the piano with his grandfather and played “Der Leiermann”. We were fascinated by this work, which seemed to know so much about what we felt and whose story was somehow our story.

The negation of the physical in song singing and the wish of the guards of the genre to use only the voice for expression were always suspicious to me and I wanted to find out what expressive possibilities Schubert’s songs reveal once you dare to give up the format that has been in use since the 1950s. It was clear to us that we would not only find approval, but we were willing to take this risk. In the end we arrived back at the beginning - with the music of Schubert and the poems of Wilhelm Muller. For despite all our search for a new format, we always wanted to be faithful to the text.

And that’s why we rehearsed for many hours during this time, listened to our concert recordings, argued and struggled for every note, every bar and every word. We discovered how wild, expressive, desperate but also hopeful, melancholic and quiet Schubert’s winter journey is. And over the years an interpretation matured which we have now recorded on this CD with sound engineer Franz Schaden near Vienna. It is not our last word on the winter journey, only a snapshot.” (Johannes Held)

"Held’s voice is on the light side, with a tenorial colour in its upper range, but he uses it sensibly and intelligently. He and Beskow have been performing the cycle together for some time and have developed an interpretation that is eminently communicative, slightly quirky, and in which one always feels a sense of hope and optimism…an eloquent, probing recording that’s well worth seeking out." - Gramophone Magazine, December 2019.