Nicholas Collon on Hans Zender

Released on Signum Classics in January and recorded immediately after staged performances at London's South Bank Centre (directed by Jane Mitchell), Nicholas Collon's account of Hans Zender's 1993 'composed interpretation' of Schubert's Winterreise with Aurora Orchestra and tenor Allan Clayton has been welcomed for the 'real virtuosity and somewhat ghoulish relish' of the playing (Gramophone) and for Clayton's remarkable 'vocal dexterity' (BBC Music Magazine) in the array of extended techniques which Zender demands from the singer.

As Collon prepared for a European tour of The Rite of Spring with Aurora (which will see the players performing Stravinsky's score entirely from memory), we spoke about why Zender's version of Winterreise is no mere gilding of the lily, the possibilities which it opens up for directors, performers and audiences alike, the composers which influenced Zender's choices, and what might become of Schubert's protagonist and the 'strange old man' he encounters after the final notes die away...

This extraordinary piece has been in your repertoire for some time now - how did you come across Zender’s ‘composed interpretation’, and what excites you about it?

I first conducted it in a church in Spitalfields in around 2014, but I have no idea how it came onto my radar! I must confess that until I started exploring the Zender I didn’t actually know the cycle very well apart from a few of the most famous songs, so it was a really lovely way of getting to know the original.

Obviously people adore the Schubert and could be quite puristic about it, but I haven’t actually heard many naysayers on the Zender version…If it was a more traditional arrangement you’d probably just think ‘What’s the point?’, but because it’s very explicitly his own take on it people tend to be more open-minded – in programmes and booklet-notes it’s credited as 'Hans Zender: Schubert's Winterreise' rather than 'Schubert's Winterreise (arr. Zender)'. Although it's fair to say that the real genius lies in Schubert’s music, I think that’s the right framing: it’s not too frustrating for those who love the original, because they’re primed to expect something different.

In this version of Winterreise, the piano becomes a large ensemble: clearly the protagonist is still the singer, but it’s also a brilliant piece for shining a spotlight on the players, which is what Aurora is all about. Essentially what Zender’s doing is exaggerating everything: he’s blowing up all the emotions and pushing things to extremes in quite a vivid colouristic way. Part of that brilliance lies in the way he picks up on sonorities that are alluded to in Winterreise anyway – there’s a hurdy-gurdy mentioned in the final song, and you can easily listen to the original and hear a lot of these effects and colours in your mind’s ear!

I think Zender offers the performers a great opportunity to show people what’s happening in each song quite clearly, giving a sense of the narrative and journey in the piece. One of the barriers for audiences in Lieder recitals today can be understanding the text - we don’t all sit there now digesting an hour of German like people would’ve done in 1827!  I say this as someone who loves the Schubert, but the prospect of listening to a singer and pianist in strophic songs for an entire concert is potentially a bit daunting for audience-members who are relatively new to the world of classical music. 

His instrumentation is so effective in drawing out the emotions of the singer (which is easy with Allan because he’s such an amazing actor), and also gives us a chance to spotlight moments when they’re communicating directly with individual players. For example if little solos are done from memory the musician can step out and interact with the singer – whereas the most you can do in a conventional recital is have the singer look over at the pianist or lean on the piano!

Is Zender very prescriptive about how he wants the piece to be staged, or did you have a fair amount of creative freedom for the live performances?

Zender already asks for a tiny bit of movement in the score itself. In the first song he specifies that he wants people processing in during that extended introduction, so he’s obviously open to performers incorporating some kind of choreographical element. For ‘Die Krähe’ we had the oboe and clarinet who represent the crow actually wearing masks, and there were some beautiful moments in ‘Rast’ where the strings stepped out and knelt around Allan as he fell asleep…On a more basic level, we also provided a still visual image for each song: now you’re in the village, now the dogs are barking, now you’re seeing the inn…

We used video sparingly – we tend not to go down that route with Aurora because it can pull focus from the performers themselves. We kept scenery to a minimum and projected important lines or phrases from the poems onto the backdrop, but didn’t want to reproduce the complete thing: Winterreise is very wordy, and if you batter people with the lot then it becomes quite meaningless! 

I also think that experiencing Winterreise as an audience-member without the text there in front of you fosters a real sense of Zen at some points – a lot of it’s repetitive because there are so many strophic songs, and although the cycle of course has its stormy moments there are quite long stretches where things are still and quiet. You have to find an inner calm when you're listening, which can be unbelievably, almost unbearably beautiful.

Does the piece present different challenges in the studio?

The sessions took place immediately after the live performances, in St Augustine's Kilburn Church, and when we were in the studio we actually stayed closer to what Zender asks for in the score. In a sense it’s easier when you’re not worrying about the staging, and it’s quite a difficult piece to perform. Like all Schubert it’s very exposed - even the songs that seem quite simple on the page - and Zender magnifies that. Of course intonation isn’t an issue that exists on the piano, but a lot of passages in the Zender version are scored for string quartet or sextet, and the tuning has to be absolutely spot-on. In other places he’s deliberately scored things so that the intonation sounds quite unstable: the keyboard and percussion are all at slightly different pitches, and tuning anything with accordion is always a nightmare! But in some passages you want true Schubertian purity, and suddenly finding that is quite hard.

The piece is utterly exhausting to sing, and in fact poor Allan lost his voice for about six weeks after the recording! Singing Winterreise multiple times in a week is tough enough, but in Zender’s version he also has to shout, scream and basically do all of those things which classical singers are told not to do…There’s one movement where a megaphone comes into play and another where he works a mic like Elvis, but the majority is just raw, unamplified singing against a small but quite loud ensemble. 

What’s the story behind your friendship with Allan?

He was in the year above me at Cambridge: in 2003 I conducted the St Matthew Passion with Allan doing the tenor solos and Anthony Rolfe Johnson (in his very last concert) as the Evangelist. The following year we did The Turn of the Screw with Allan as the Prologue/Peter Quint, then he sang Tamino in a production of Die Zauberflöte which we took to Palestine with Samuel West directing.

I don’t think Allan would mind me saying that there’s a touch of Peter Grimes and the Winterreise protagonist in him anyway, and he finds it quite easy to call upon that in performance – he’s a total stage animal when it comes to finding that incredible range of emotion. Even if you took singing out of the equation altogether he’d still be a brilliant actor: as various critics said when he created the role of Hamlet in Brett Dean’s opera, you could put him on stage in Shakespeare and he’d be equally mesmerising. 

Which twentieth-century composers do you think inspired Zender’s choices?

On one level it’s a kind of homage to those chamber arrangements of Mahler’s orchestral song cycles which Schoenberg made just after the First World War, though of course Zender is upscaling things rather than reducing them down. It’s obviously Expressionistic, but in a post-Bergian way: the use of the harmonica and accordion puts me in mind of Weill and his 1920s Weimar period. 

But it’s also very clearly a product of its own time: quite a few composers in the 1990s pursued a sort of backward-glance aesthetic which involves revisiting nineteenth-century music and bringing out its hard edges. HK Gruber is another composer who sits within that tradition, and it’s a furrow which people are still ploughing today - Jörg Widmann has just done an arrangement of Dichterliebe, and his colours are pretty similar to that Zenderish world. 

Zender adds an extended prelude and postlude to the cycle, featuring various sonorities which are a world away from Schubert - tell me a little about how some of those are achieved…

Those eerie sounds at the beginning are made by sandpaper crunching on tom-toms, then he layers col legno strings on top of that. Next the winds enter, playing with only half notes so it sounds quite airy, then the guitar, which is very Weimar. It’s so effective when all of that suddenly cuts off as the voice comes in, surrounded by just strings: it sounds very pure and Schubert-like.

The Postlude is an extraordinary thing, and of course that’s all Zender. He adds a chord that’s layered up like a series of harmonics, which obviously isn’t found anywhere in Schubert, then it all dies down…And the genius of that movement lies in the introduction of saxophone, which Zender doesn’t use until that point – although it’s a bit of a pain for the player, as they have to sit around all night!  The hurdy-gurdy referenced in the text is literally right there in the accordion, but to have the melody on saxophone at the end is a lovely touch. 

I always feel that the Postlude is a little bit hopeful. Winterreise ends with a big question-mark, and I’ve always wondered about what happens to the protagonist and the hurdy-gurdy man after the cycle finishes… listening to Zender’s version, you can imagine them going off and founding a new style of performance-art in 1930s Berlin!

What’s up next for Aurora?

We’re about to embark on a big European tour called The Rite By Heart, performing The Rite of Spring from memory and directed by Jane Mitchell who staged the Zender with us: we have twenty performances, starting at the Royal Festival Hall on 16th April, then taking it to Berlin, Munich etc… We did it at the Proms in 2023, and it’s an amazing, super-fun piece to memorise – it is possible, and it’s totally liberating! 

Allan Clayton reprises the title-role in Deborah Warner's production of Peter Grimes at Covent Garden next month.