Review: A Conceptual 'Winterreise' Puts a Spin on Schubert

Hans Zender once orchestrated what he called a “composed interpretation,” which Ian Bostridge later toured in a multimedia staging by Netia Jones. William Kentridge has added to the cycle his trademark animated collage. In “Winterize,” the piece’s journey was made literal as performer and audience walked through a chilly Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And the score, originally written for tenor, has been transposed every which way for different voice types — and genders.

But not content to simply sing “Winterreise” as a mezzo-soprano, DiDonato sought something different in the version she brought to Carnegie Hall on Sunday, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin trading his conductor’s baton for a seat at the piano. (The concert is streaming at medici.tv.)

Their “Winterreise” hinges on a change in perspective. Little is known about the cycle’s protagonist, other than that heartbreak has sent him on a bitter march toward despair and possibly death. Even less is revealed about the woman he loves — yet her story is the one DiDonato wants to tell.

Her inspiration is Charlotte, in Massenet’s “Werther,” which she stars in this spring at the Metropolitan Opera, with Nézet-Séguin conducting. “I’ve always wondered what happens to her when the curtain comes down,” DiDonato wrote in a program note. “Does she cave in to her passion and follow Werther into his fate of suicide?”

The same question, DiDonato argues, could be asked of the woman of “Winterreise.” Attempting an answer on Sunday, she walked onstage all in black; sat at a table covered in black fabric, as if the furniture were also in mourning; and opened a leather-bound notebook. A supertitle screen above the stage displayed the text “He sent me his journal in the post. …”

This performance, then, was of a woman reading “Winterreise” — a concept that added distance from the material and limited the possibilities of interpretive range. Without being able to truly inhabit the piece, DiDonato had few modes of expression to work with: her face more or less alternating between horror and sadness, her voice often the same degree of generic lyrical beauty.

By placing her character at a remove, DiDonato bound herself to an unchanging tone, despite Müller’s emotive poetry; her Met-sized sound didn’t always serve a work that thrives on intimacy and interiority. In her finest moments, she held back her vibrato and grandeur and was touchingly humble in “Der Lindenbaum,” delicate and lilting in “Frühlingstraum.”

Nézet-Séguin was both sensitive to DiDonato’s singing — echoing her articulation in “Wasserflut” with subtle elegance — and prepared to stake an interpretive claim in sonatalike solos. The outburst of “Der Stürmische Morgen” had Beethovenian ferocity; the closing chords of “Das Wirsthaus,” while in excess of what’s called for in the score, were a climactic gut punch.

It wasn’t until the final song, “Der Leiermann,” that DiDonato seemed to achieve what she had set out to say with this “Winterreise.” She had stopped reading from the journal with the previous number, and was for the first time singing as the unnamed woman herself. With a character revealed — and delivered with an unwavering blank expression of ravaged resignation — these minutes were finally a glimpse into the story DiDonato thought she was telling all along.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .