Eine Winterreise – Michael Wollny

Loneliness, uncertainty, the search for the right path: for Michael Wollny, the great questions of our time are all there in Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise”. His solo album “eine winterreise” re-imagines the iconic song cycle and goes far beyond it: a path through the ice that is uniquely his. Fragments of Schubert meet newly composed passages, free improvisations and motifs by Kate Bush, Björk and Louis Cole. Like it’s model, Wollny’s journey is a sequence of character pieces that combine into a single narrative arc, with a choreography of moods, a precise sequence of scenes, and a kind of dream logic running between the songs. It was recorded at the 16th-century “Reitstadel” in Neumarkt, Bavaria, a hall with a legendary history of piano recordings, whose crystalline clarity fits the album’s winter theme perfectly: the sound of the grand piano required no dynamic processing whatsoever. Thoroughly contemporary piano music with deep roots: full of contrasts, by turns rugged, beautiful and enigmatic.