Peter Harvey - Winterreise - Musical Pointers

A Winterreise for the 19th & 21st Centuries!

Backed with thorough musciological exploration into appropriate instruments and transpositions etc, this is an important recording, one to challenge the intensity of many famous Lieder singers who fill the Wigmore Hall several times a year supported by modern Steinway pianos.

It is for us particularly welcome after a year of saturation in Mozart and Beethoven piano music on fortepiano - Bilson, Bezuidenhout etc - Cooper's choice of an early 19th century fortepiano (copy of an 1823 Broadwood) is ideal.

It all comes across with a new immediacy, not relying on rhetoric and histrionics and is an essential purchase for unprejudiced collectors to have on the shelf alongside the Fischer-Dieskaus (8 of his!) and a myriad others.

I am assured by my German speaking wife, a sometime contributor to Musical Pointers, who used to sing some of the songs as a child, that there are no linguistic problems with this version, which is totally engrossing and was splendidly recorded in a Berkshire church over three days in February 2009.

Recommended, then, with no reservations about the disc itself.