Michael Tanner

Licensed to trill

Plus: to trill or not to trill in Schubert’s final piano sonata?

issue 16 February 2019

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of approach to performing Schubert’s Winterreise, though sometimes there’s doubt or dispute about which one a given performer has taken. According to Jonas Kaufmann, Hans Hotter, for me the greatest of all performers of the cycle, as of so much else, insisted that the performer should be a narrator, not the Wanderer himself.

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