Schubert: Winterreise – review

Best known as a soloist with groups such as the Monteverdi Choir, baritone Peter Harvey here joins the ranks of British singers communicating fresh ideas about Schubert's great song cycle. The performance bristles with musical intelligence, historical sensibility and linguistic expertise. Harvey and Gary Cooper, playing a copy of an 1823 Brodmann piano, have gone back to original sources and examined Schubert's many verbal or melodic changes of mind. The keyboard colour, without the usual "equal temperament" tuning, is light-toned and full of rapid contrasts - an ideal match for Harvey's voice. Linn Records, Gramophone's Label of the Year 2010, produces a sound so lively you think they are performing in your Biedermeier drawing room.