New Winterreise Recording (Mark Padmore, Paul Lewis)
According to Amazon.com a new recording of Winterreise
A review of the recording can be found at ClassicsToday.com and a review of a live performance they gave can be found at Musicweb-International.com.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
What on earth will Alfred Brendel say when he hears this? Paul Lewis plays like a totally ignorant musically illiterate beginner. In “Wasserfluth” he applies the infamous ‘flexible dotting’, turning the notes in the left hand into triplets (a nonsensical interpretion that has justly been derided by recent Schubert scholarship). In “Der Leiermann” he plays a completely different text than the one Schubert wrote: first he plays the grace note in the first two bars ON THE BEAT which is simply wrong, sounds just awful and is total nonsense here. And second (and I couldn’t believe my ears first), he CONTINUES to play the dissonant note (the sharp fourth together with the fifth) on the first eighth note of the dotted half notes throughout the whole song (as if Schubert had written “segue” into the score and the whole song were an “ad libitum number”). Consequently the whole cycle now has to end with a dissonant chord instead of A minor. Schubert is rotating in his grave while ignorant journalists praise this crap and clueless consumers happily buy it!