Search - Hans Zender :: Zender--Schuberts "Winterreise": Eine komponierte Interpretation

Winterreise. Schubert arr. Zender

MR TIMOTHY MARCHMONT | Brisbane, Australia | 12/29/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Upon first listening to Hans Zender's "Composed Interpretation" of this work, I thought: No! This is terrible! A travesty! I want nothing to do with it! But listening on through the recording I soon changed my mind to think: This is very interesting indeed. It is a perfectly valid interpretation, and one I like. Now, I admire and cherish Schubert's great masterpiece the way he wrote it; but an interpretaton such as this, which helps us to understand just how harrowing (schauerlich)Schubert's contemporaries found it, is valid, interesting and very helpful in understanding that there are so many facets to any great work. Some we notice ourselves, and others which have to be pointed out to us, some we might not be comfortable with and even ones which the composer might not have actually intended - just as Brahms made his own version of Haydn's "St Anthony" chorale, and as Ravel superimposed his own personality onto Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an exhibition".
Purists will say that Herr Zender is wrong to do this. But I am sure he is not trying to say to us that his verson is an improvement on Schubert's original. He is merely showing us the piece from an unusual and fascinating angle. Hans Zender's "Composed Interpretation" of Schubert's "Winterreise" deserves to be heard by a wide audience. I myself intend to perform it within the next two years."