Schubert’s Winterreise – the composer’s great psychodrama in song – ends devastatingly. Der Leiermann conjures a chilling vision of a hurdy-gurdy man. Alone beyond the village he plays his melancholy tune, luring the narrator to him – perhaps also to his death? The haunting song, with its anchoring drone, begs for colours the piano can only suggest. Presumably that was the seed for this unusual collaboration between veteran US bass-baritone Thomas Hampson and Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova.
You can see the logic that swaps piano for accordion and frames the Schubert with songs by Kurt Weill and a tango by Piazzolla: this is street music with its face washed and hair brushed, invited into the salon, the cabaret, the opera house.
At least, that’s what I assume was going on. In the absence of any programme notes, texts or translations, substance was clearly secondary to style in what began to feel a lot like a vanity exercise. The concert was styled as Schubert’s Winterreise but what we got were edited highlights: a heavy-footed Gute Nacht, those pulsing piano chords now the grinding, grimy chug of the accordion; a pleasantly folksy Frühlingstraum; a strangely mono-mood Lindenbaum. Sidorova’s accordion said everything the piano normally would but with less subtlety, while Hampson busked his way through, letting diction do the heavy-lifting in the quiet legatos where the voice no longer can.
A programme of barely 70 minutes didn’t really need an interval, but afterwards we got party pieces: two solos for Sidorova – a crisply sensual rendition of Piazzolla’s Chau Paris and the silvery melancholy of Revelation by contemporary composer Sergey Voytenko. The highlight of the evening, each showed what both the magnificently articulate Sidorova and the accordion can do in their natural habitat.
Hampson also turned for home in the second half with a sequence of Kurt Weill’s cuddlier songs. Here we saw the showman in full spate, crooning, finger-clicking and dad-dancing his way through Speak Low, It Never Was You and Westwind. Mack the Knife (sung in German for full effect) had more bite, but this Weill was about as edgy as Ralph Lauren, and not quite as stylish. Encores of Sway and Night and Day delighted the crowd, but did little to quiet the sense of cruise ship that lingered over the performance.
