You can approach works of art with a checklist, as many aficionados who fill halls for ballet, song recitals, or opera performances do. Or you can have an open mind and eyes and ears to match. Of course experience and expertise come in handy in forming evaluations. But when they stand in the way of understanding how artists create interpretations as a means of drawing closer to a work, they are little more than gateposts to pedantry. These thoughts come to mind during Matthias Goerne's performances of the three great song cycles of Franz Schubert this week at Ravinia's Martin Theatre -- a week to be capped with Goerne's collaboration Sunday with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Ravinia's pavilion in orchestrated versions of seven other Schubert songs. What Goerne is sharing with his audience here -- the only U.S. venue for these programs -- is no how-to guide for singing German lieder nor any kind of a model for other aspiring vocalists. Rather, it is an argument for a full encounter with a masterwork, an encounter that goes beyond technical choices (important as they are) and decisions about minute-by-minute presentation and comes instead to a meeting with the work's creator and a sharing of the soul that has been transformed by that meeting. Schubert's greatest song cycle, Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), performed Wednesday night at the Martin, is a work of madness, the madness of its narrator, a survivor of some sort of failed courtship, and the insights that Schubert had even at age 30 into the mind of someone who becomes unhinged over the end of a love affair. Goerne, who first recorded this 80-minute, 24-song work in 1996 when he was not yet 30, knows that he is showing us a lost soul; his performance is like that of a great stage actor who has wholly assimilated a monodrama of Samuel Beckett and then allows his narration of those lines to carry him and his audience away. That Goerne rocks and sways and sometimes seems to fall into a trance onstage is nothing artificial and never done for effect. It's where he's found himself after more than a decade of living with and digging deeper into this material. The tether here is the piano partnership of Schubertian master Christoph Eschenbach. If Goerne can take us to inner places of desperation in such songs as "Der Wegweiser" ("The Road Sign"), then Eschenbach can play the piano so softly and with such a sense of hushed yet always lyrical sound in that song or the famed, closing "Der Leirmann" ("The Hurdy-Gurdy Man") that it mystifies even the professional pianists in the audience. The two offer the posthumous Schwanengesang ("Swan Song") today; Eschenbach also gives a too-rare-for-him solo performance of Schubert's last sonata, in B-Flat Major, D. 960, to close what is sure to be a most memorable week.Here is my Friday July 31 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Wednesday July 29, 2009, performance of Schubert's Winterreise, D. 911, by Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach at Ravinia's Martin Theatre. The don't-miss recital series wraps up tonight with Schwanengesang, D. 957, and the B-Flat Major piano sonata, D. 960, at 8 p.m. Goerne and Eschenbach then join with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Sunday at Ravinia's pavilion at 5 p.m. for a program of seven Schubert songs orchestrated by Brahms, Reger (including Im Abendrot and Erlkönig), Webern (including Der Wegweiser from Winterreise -- see below -- and Tränenregen from Die schöne Müllerin), and Anon E. Mous ("An Silvia"), along with some Johann Strauss, Jr. waltzes and polkas.
Goerne's Winterreise goes beyond the norm
Baritone reads Schubert's mind at Ravinia
BY ANDREW PATNER
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