Ian Bostridge/Saskia Giorgini review — exquisitely painful Schubert
★★★★☆
Yearning hearts, weeping eyes, endless longing: the life of a lonely Romantic wanderer is not just emotionally draining, it’s exhausting. And nowhere was it more so than in this powerful performance by Ian Bostridge and Saskia Giorgini of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, that collection of 14 songs cannily brought together after the composer’s death by his publisher.
Even if it’s not truly a song cycle, unlike Winterreise or Die schöne Müllerin, the central themes of love and loss give this “swan song” a compelling coherence, a sense that we’re witnessing the existential angst of a single narrator. And while Rellstab, Heine and Seidl’s texts — full of whispered dreams to slumbering sweethearts and imploring serenades from moonlit groves — could seem far removed from
