I’ve seen Schubert’s Winterreise done many ways.  There’s the classic one with baritone and piano and more rarely soprano (including a memorable performance by Adrienne Pieczonka as a passing cold front battered the hall!).  I’ve seen it done with projections and three singers and I’ve seen made into a film.  So there’s nothing particularly outré about arranging it to add a choir to baritone and piano.  The choir can function as Greek chorus or alter ego or whatever.  Any way that’s what Gregor Meyer did and what the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers conducted by Jean-Sébastian Vallée performed when they joined forces with Brett Polegato and Philip Chiu at Trinity St. Paul’s on Saturday night.

It was an interesting experiment and a very skilled band of performers gave it a pretty good try but for me it really didn’t work all that well.  I would certainly have preferred Brett and Philip alone or even an arrangement for choir.  The trouble is that adding a choir and conductor undermines what is at the heart of Lieder singing; the partnership between singer and pianist that brings to life the partnership between text and music.  Adding another element breaks that up and, at times, forces the singer into a space they likely wouldn’t have chosen if they didn’t have to; i.e. they have to sing loudly all the time.  Unsurprisingly then the bits that worked best were when either the choir or the soloist sang alone.  The one song where there seemed to be genuine synergy was “Mut!” but that’s number twenty two in the twenty four song cycle so it was a bit late.

Each half of Winterreise was introduced by a couple of songs arranged or written for choir.  Up front we heard arrangements of Clara Schumann’s songs by James McCullough which were OK but does anyone really prefer Schumann’s “Liebst du um Schönheit” to Mahler’s?  The two pieces by Fanny Hensel; “Lockung” and “Schöne Fremde”, were interesting and effective and showed the choir at its considerable best.

I don’t resent that organisations try different things even if they don’t always succeed.  On the contrary I encourage it but the risk is that, like this one, it may not work as well as one might wish.

Photo credits: Taylor Long