United Kingdom Schubert: Sam Poppleton (baritone), Harry Sever (piano). St. Martin’s Church, Salisbury, 8.2.2025. (CK)
Schubert – Winterreise
Schubert’s Winterreise. Ian Bostridge called it the first and greatest of concept albums (almost a century-and-a-half ahead of Sergeant Pepper). Of course, when you perform it live you have to do it in a single 75-minute take.
Sam Poppleton and Harry Sever came on like characters from a Beckett play – Vladimir and Estragon, perhaps: Harry to the piano at the front, Sam to the back of the church. Their performance was memorable not least for the allusive richness generated between the 24 stations of Müller’s and Schubert’s bleak vision, the visual nod to the Theatre of the Absurd and the inescapable overtones of enacting them in a church – the oldest in Salisbury, apparently, predating the Cathedral.
We might expect a song entitled Gute Nacht to close a work, not to open it. This first (and longest) song became a kind of processional, a distant echo, perhaps, of the Stations of the Cross. Sam has a beautiful baritone voice, predominantly and attractively airy and light, with a quality that suggests – to me, anyway – vulnerability. The turn to the major, in this song and elsewhere in the cycle, was heart-rending rather than comforting: we sense, even if we do not know what is to come, that such moments will be brief and illusory. The softening of the voice at the song’s end tugged at the heart.
Winterreise is not quite a partnership of equals, but the piano is as much a protagonist as an accompaniment. In Harry Sever’s hands the turbulent openings of songs such as Die Wetterfahne, Erstarrung and Rückblick made a strong impression; he was unfailingly responsive to the sombre imagery of Müller’s poems – frozen tears and the like – and to the gamut of emotions that Schubert’s music runs from tenderness and poignancy to numbness and despair. The acoustic of St Martin’s blurred some of the detail, but in general the ambient warmth and resonance contributed positively to the power of the performance of pianist and singer alike. They understood each other perfectly: the sinister piano in Gefror’ne Tränen was matched by the darkening of the voice in the middle stanza, and in Der Lindenbaum they both persuaded us – the piano part blossoming, the voice in a radiant major key – that we had reached an oasis. It doesn’t last: there was pain as well as tenderness in Sam’s final stanza.
In Wasserflut we were back to the frozen minor, relieved only by the passing warmth of the mild breeze. Touchingly, Sam knelt down to address the snow; he took the hint in Rast to take the weight off his feet, and stayed sitting until the bouncing introduction to Die Post had him springing to his feet.
Each song is a mini-drama, but it seemed to me that something more was happening in Frühlingstraum – not so much a turning-point as a change, the beginning of something ruinous, even the onset of madness. The lovely piano opening – Sam still taking his ease – jarred with the horror of the crowing cocks and cawing ravens in the second stanza: the contrast was so vividly pointed by both voice and piano that there was a hint of schizophrenia in it. Through the next songs, as far as Täuschung, Sam’s traveller seemed progressively alienated, driven in on himself: the full-throated, heroic confidence of ‘Mein Herz!’ in Die Post gave way to hollow, sepulchral tones in Der greise Kopf; and there was a fey humour in his removal of his hat while the crow flies round his bare head. In Harry’s accompaniment to Letzte Hoffnung we could almost see the wind playing with the leaves; and Sam’s voice at the poignant close sounded appropriately hollow.
Sam’s actions were never a distraction: if anything, his performance was notable for its naturalness and its avoidance of any kind of exaggeration or attitudinising. In Im Dorfe his movements – a kind of gentle clowning (or is he himself a leaf played with by the wind?) – suggested his detachment from the concerns of the sleeping villagers; and when in Der stürmische Morgen his coat became his imaginary dance partner he made an oddly touching, Prufrock-like figure.
And so we reached the signpost, Der Wegweiser, and a kind of clarity: all that now stands between him and his death is the journey (a predicament, I guess, that we all share). For all the hymn-like gravity of the introduction to Das Wirtshaus, the graveyard won’t admit him: there was weariness here in Sam’s faltering voice, and bitterness in his acceptance that he must press onwards. Hat and coat went back on. His Mut! was the bitter bravado of a man on the edge, evaporating quickly in Die Nebensonnen as his head dropped again. Full-voiced in the second stanza, exhausted in the brief third, Sam’s traveller here touched tragic stature.
When the tenor James Gilchrist performed Winterreise in Winchester a couple of years ago he cautioned against investing the hurdy-gurdy man with too much symbolic significance: he is a momentary companion only, a brother of King Lear’s poor naked wretches, who the traveller overtakes before he passes out of sight and hearing in search of his own quietus. Maybe: but in Der Leiermann (sung where he had started, at the back of the church) Sam’s voice sounded like an echo of itself; almost like the disembodied voice from a phone with a poor signal, just starting to break up. It was most affectingly done; and it suggested, harrowingly, that the journey onwards would not be long.
It was a superb performance, compelling from first to last, consistently moving, magnificently thought through. It is clear from their brief biographies in the programme that both artists are busily and promisingly engaged: Harry as a conductor, primarily at leading opera houses and festivals, and Sam as a member of prestigious choirs including VOCES8 and Tenebrae. It is also heartening to read that they are both committed to educational work in many forms. Our sympathy is invited for Sam as ‘a long-suffering Newcastle Utd. supporter’: now that the Magpies are an oil sheikh’s plaything, like so many Premier League clubs, that phrase may need editing (as a Bristol City fan I probably know more about suffering than he does). No matter: it was a privilege to hear and to see them bring Schubert’s daunting masterpiece to life, and an experience that I am unlikely to forget.
Chris Kettle