A Winter’s Journey

Presented by Musica Viva Australia, tenor Allan Clayton and pianist Kate Golla perform Schubert’s immortal songs of love and loss, newly reinterpreted for Australia through Lindy Hume’s direction and Fred Williams’ wondrous landscape paintings.

About the concert

In 1827 Franz Schubert composed an emotionally charged song cycle. Setting poems of the German writer Wilhelm Müller, Schubert created an emotional journey of a man trekking across frozen rivers and snowy landscapes, lamenting his lost love. It is indeed a winter’s journey (Winterreise), full of images and metaphors of love, loss, nationhood.

A Winter’s Journey is a new staging by Musica Viva Australia of Schubert’s iconic songs, bringing a very different winter into focus, set against a backdrop of Australian painter Fred Willliams’ vivid landscapes.

Acclaimed stage director Lindy Hume is our cartographer, mapping the terrain of heart and country for the gripping stage charisma of English tenor Allan Clayton and sensitive musicianship of Australian pianist Kate Golla. Videographer Dave Bergman provides the backdrop, bringing to life 24 Williams paintings that match and contradict Müller’s poems and Schubert’s musical imagination, all in gorgeous larger-than-life imagery.

This powerful artistic combination sets the perfect conditions to experience Schubert’s immortal masterpiece – songs of love and loss that still speak to us vividly, in this far distant time and place.