The Oxford Lieder festival has morphed into Oxford International Song festival, recognising the reality that its concerts have never been exclusively devoted to German song, but always included art songs from other traditions. Yet lieder still features very prominently in the programmes, and the middle weekend remains devoted to Schubert, with the centrepiece of that festival-within-a-festival this year a performance of Winterreise from the outstanding German soprano Juliane Banse, partnered by the pianist Alexander Krichel.
Banse is a rare enough recitalist in the UK to make any appearance a special occasion. Yet this was not a straightforward concert performance of this greatest of all song cycles, but the latest attempt at building a piece of music theatre around Winterreise. It seems to be a fashionable exercise at present – last year, for instance, the tenor Allan Clayton performed the cycle in front of an ever changing backdrop of paintings – yet in general those trappings tend to diminish the dramatic power of the songs themselves. But here the singer was partnered by a dancer, István Simon, and it worked wonderfully well; with choreography by Andreas Heise, it enhanced the impact of the performance in an utterly unexpected way.
It helped hugely that Banse became very much part of the movement too. It turns out that she trained as a ballet dancer in her youth, and the supple grace of her movements provided a wonderful counterpoint to those of Simon, whose own role seemed at different times to be an embodiment of the despair of this winter traveller, the image of the lover who had forsaken him, or his comforter.
But as singer and dancer moved around the performing space, sometimes apart, sometimes entwined, the focus never wavered, for extraordinarily, Banse showed that she was capable of singing with her familiar beauty of tone and punctilious focus on the text in whatever position the choreography placed her, whether lying on the floor, spread across Simon’s back, or huddled against the piano as if taking refuge from the world. There was nothing reductive about these movements, no lapses into naturalistic depictions; everything was still channelled through the texts and Schubert’s response to them, which Banse and Krichel projected with such faithfulness and vivid musical intelligence.
• Oxford International Song festival runs until 28 October
