Roderick Williams presents English song cycle inspired by Schubert’s Winterreise

Roderick Williams conceived the idea of creating an English-song equivalent to Schubert’s Winterreise while studying the cycle a decade ago, and has since refined a playlist of English songs that arrived in the programme presented here. The conceit runs for about an hour and a half and, the reviewer says, holds up especially well in the hands of Williams’s lithe tone and instinctive storytelling.

Some parallels between Schubert and the chosen English repertoire were direct: Vaughan Williams’s The Vagabond shares the same dogged tread as Winterreise’s Good Night, Quilter’s Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind mirrors the flurry of chords in Schubert’s Weathervane, and Linden Lea, given here in a gently burring Dorset dialect, acts as a musical doppelgänger for the Linden Tree.

Other connections were subtler, with Ina Boyle’s A Song of Enchantment reflecting Schubert’s Will-o-the-Wisp, Britten’s Midnight on the Great Western echoing Winterreise’s 19th-century mail coach, a crow becoming an ambiguous angel, and Schubert’s Inn translating into the literal cemetery of Finzi’s In a Churchyard.

One notable difference is the emotional focus: where Schubert’s protagonist is leaving a recent relationship, Williams’s selection is often concerned with long-lost loves and the irrevocable passage of time. That shift, the review notes, lends the newly curated English cycle a deeper melancholy than the original, which feels more youthfully resolute.

Key Topics

Culture, Roderick Williams, Winterreise, Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Christopher Glynn