Released on Friday 16 January 2026
Signum Records, 2026
⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Bleak, wintry, morbid – and you need to hear it” (Geoff Brown, The Times)
“[Nicholas Collon and his orchestra] bring real virtuosity and a somewhat ghoulish relish to every one of Zender’s effects.” (Hugo Shirley, Gramophone)
“a visceral new interpretation of the cycle” (Presto Classical, Recording of the Week)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “The Aurora players under Nicholas Collon’s direction are superbly mood-inducing. This Winter’s Journey is quite the magical mystery.” (Ken Walton, The Scotsman)
I think the fact Schubert wrote Winterreise when he did, at that time in his life, means there’s a horrible truthfulness to the sorrow,’ remarks soloist Allan Clayton. ‘None of us knows – because we’ve not gone there and come back – but it feels like someone who knows he’s dying, and this means it speaks to us. It’s honest, it’s raw and it’s horrible. It’s truthful about love and loss and hope and despair.’
In February 1827 Schubert invited a group of friends to listen to his latest collection of songs. The composer had set a sequence of verses by Saxon poet Wilhelm Müller and commented to his friend, Joseph von Spaun: ‘I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have affected me more than any of my other songs.’ Spaun later documented the gathering in his memoirs: ‘[Schubert] sang the entire Winterreise through to us, in a voice full of emotion. We were dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs and [Franz von] Schober said that only one, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, ‘I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.’
Schubert’s musical account of a lost and solitary soul struggling across a frozen landscape is one of grief, beauty and perhaps unparalleled emotional depth. The work has long captured the imaginations of musicians and audiences. Yet while composers from Brahms to Britten have arranged individual Schubert songs for instrumental ensembles, Hans Zender’s epic ‘composed interpretation’ of 1993 is surely the boldest of such projects, with a score that sits somewhere between instrumental arrangement and orchestral fantasia. The vocal part is largely unchanged but Zender’s chamber writing is richly divergent from Schubert’s original piano line. The result is a kaleidoscopic, instinctive response to the song cycle. At times the folk-like quality of Müller’s tale is captured in intimate scoring for guitar, accordion and harmonicas, while other passages recall a Mahlerian carnival or the expressionism of Alban Berg.
As Clayton observes, ‘the instruments Zender uses could almost sound comic in places but, for instance, with all the melodicas, they actually sound like broken accordions or broken woodwind instruments, which gives you this fractured, broken-down sense of the character’s experience. His journey is fractured; it’s not moving from A-B, he’s constantly going back and revisiting moments, and I think this almost schizophrenic quality is highlighted beautifully by Zender’s writing.’
