Vramsmo, West

Imma, Dublin:Swedish baritone Håkan Vramsmo and British pianist Andrew West, invited here by the Association of Music Lovers, brought a powerfully ruminative interpretation of Winterreise, Schubert's travelogue of rejected love. The 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller were set originally for tenor, and their transposition to what were sometimes the lowest feasible keys accentuated the cycle's underlying lugubriousness.

Vramsmo’s darker sonorities were thus at the fore, with the sense of over-burdening emotion sometimes making itself even more keenly felt through slight deflections of the pitch. While his tone brightened to good effect in No 11 Frühlingstraum (

Dream of Spring

) and No 15

Die Krähe (The Crow)

, a persuasive continuity of line was more consistently characteristic of statelier, more thoroughly despondent songs, such as No 12

Einsamkeit (Loneliness)

and No 23

Die Nebensonnen (Phantom Suns).

Without in the least detracting from Vramsmo’s dramatic dejection, West treated Schubert’s sometimes wallpaper-like piano parts to an array of vitalising ideas. Clarity of touch more than compensated for any gruffness resulting from low transpositions, changes between major and minor registered with heightened significance, and figurations were laid out with delicately artful objectivity. Above all, the shrewd suppleness of West’s timekeeping invested every moment – be it of sound or silence – with urgency.