News
28.11.03
A new volume of the St. Petersburg Musical Archive is being released. We continue introducing achievements of the remarkable Belgian tenor Zeger Vandersteene, and his collection of records of German Romantic Music to friends of music. This time, it is Winterreise, or “Winter Journey”, by Franz Schubert. Fanfare, a very influential U.S. magazine, commented on this work, “Zeger Vandersteene’s Winterreise is a pleasant surprise and anything forgettable… If you want a tenor Winterreise, seek no further”.
Joseph Spaun, one of the most devoted and keen friends of the composer, called Schubert’s Winter Journey “ a cycle of excellent… and probably the most beautiful songs ever written to German lyrics.” Since then, the German and Austrian lyrical vocal genre has been enriched with a lot of remarkable pieces, but Spaun’s opinion still does not seem an exaggeration, for this string of songs to words by Wilhelm Müller is a special phenomenon even among great opuses of Schumann and Liszt, Mahler and Wolff (and of Schubert himself too).
The performing archive of the Schubert — Müller cycle now comprises hundreds and thousands of interpretations and recordings. The Northern Flowers are happy to offer their contribution, a deep, refined, and inspired one, now available also to music lovers in Russia.