Winterreise

So then I thought about traveling music.

And one of the big pieces of traveling music is Schubert's Winterreise.

So, and it has this lovely tune.

You know, it has this...

This month, we're delighted to share a conversation with the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and Suleiman Suleiman, who'll be bringing their project Kabuki Winterizer Spring Snow to Wigmore Hall on Sunday 11th October.

It's a meditation on sound, silence, solitude and communion, on love and loss, and it intertwines the narratives of Yasuna, which is one of the great kabuki plays dating back to 1818, and Schubert's iconic Winterreise conceived a decade later in 1827.

Grief splinters the feelings of both Schubert's Wanderer and Yasuna, prompting them to make their journeys into the darkness and into the depths of the self.

Well, in this conversation and in the performance, Fleur and Suleiman explore their own experiences of grief alongside the music.

I mean, we were in rehearsals together all the time.

And I think some of our very first conversations were about Schubert.

Like we just nerded out together about Schubert and how much we loved Winterreise because I'd been slowly working my way into kind of loving it and performing it for a year.

I think I'd done maybe two or three at that point only performances of the cycle and then you were this like Schubert fanatic so we were just like bombed in the corner doing Wagner and then like quietly talking about Schubert in the corner and then I think when you started telling me about all these amazing Kabuki projects that you were producing I thought I was like there must be a way to somehow combine these things you know also because I had already like in my own curatorial work been kind of investigating quite a lot of transcultural links in other types of projects.