‘Pavol Breslik’

‘I came here as a stranger, a stranger I depart… Love likes to wander – God has made it so.’ From the first lied of Winterreise, ‘Gute Nacht’, we are touched by the torment of the lost traveller. He wanders in the depth of winter, his heart torn. Winterreise is one of the last song cycles composed by Schubert, in 1827, and one of the most poignant. It shows the musical language of the composer in all its maturity, at a time when he was living alone in Vienna, slowly succumbing to an illness that would carry him off a year later. The Slovak tenor Pavol Breslik, together with the virtuoso pianist Amir Katz, recently gave a memorable recital at La Monnaie of profoundly Romantic songs by Dvořák, Liszt, and Schumann. Now he lends his voice to Schubert’s farewell song, to the twilight romanticism of this winter journey, and takes the risk of claiming as his own the words of the poet: ‘It’s a path that I must travel and none returns from there…’