Hans Jörg Mammel, Arthur Schoonderwoerd - Franz Schubert: Winterreise (2006)

This is surely a Winterreise too far. The finest interpreters – including, among tenors, Peter Schreier, Ian Bostridge and Christoph Prégardien – make the wanderer’s inner and outer journey through the snowbound landscape a cathartic experience. Hans Jörg Mammel, whose career has been largely in early music, musters a generalised sensitivity but never grips or haunts the imagination. His light, monochrome voice grows raw and “yowly” under pressure; and his expression ranges from the mildly plaintive to the mildly indignant. Tempi – usually on the mobile side – are well judged, rhythms distinctly “straight”, sometimes to the point of rigidity. At best you could say Mammel gives a performance of touching innocence. But in this cycle of complex, disturbing experience, that is not enough.

Incongruously, Arthur Schoonderwoerd sometimes batters his early 19th-century Fritz fortepiano mercilessly – the crashing sforzando accents in “Gute Nacht” and “Der Lindenbaum” had me diving for cover. In fairness, his playing can be effective elsewhere – say, in Schubert’s evocation of rattling chains in “Im Dorfe” (the fortepiano’s dry percussive bass an advantage here); or in the final “Der Leiermann”, where the mute pedal conjures a remote, unearthly sonority impossible to achieve on a modern Steinway. Neither he nor Mammel, though, are done any favours by an absurdly cavernous acoustic that suggests a communal washroom.

If you want the combination of tenor and period fortepiano in Winterreise, look no further than the beautifully matched partnership of Christoph Prégardien and Andreas Staier (Teldec, 12/97): an intensely “lived” performance, less neurotically tormented than, say, Schreier and Fischer-Dieskau, but no less moving, with the bleak inwardness of the final songs culminating in a confiding, almost compassionate address to the organ grinder.