Tenor Mark Padmore and pianist Mitsuko Uchida tell Richard Morrison about forging a partnership that, as their new recording of Schubert and Beethoven song-cycles shows, has brought out the best in both of them
Mark Padmore & Mitsuko Uchida
Cast your mind back two and a half years, if you can bear it, to when the world was in lockdown and all live public music-making silenced. For me, and I suspect thousands of other music lovers, one of the few beacons of consolation during that grim, Covid-saturated summer of 2020 were 20 lunchtime concerts broadcast on BBC Radio 3 from an empty Wigmore Hall. They culminated in one of the most harrowing yet moving song recitals I can remember: the tenor Mark Padmore and the pianist Mitsuko Uchida performing Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise.
It wasn’t just that their interpretation of this nihilistic masterpiece, composed by Schubert in the penultimate year of his life, was riveting in its desolate intensity. The mood of the music also seemed uncannily to match the mood of those desperate times. The image that Wilhelm Müller’s poetry leaves hanging in the icy air at the end of the cycle — a hurdy-gurdy man with an empty begging-bowl, ignored by the world — seemed, at that time anyway, likely to be prophetic of musical life in the UK, which was then hanging by a thread as thin as the plaintive piano refrain that concludes Schubert’s winter journey. I WOULDN’T SAY THAT our musical life is back to anything like its pre-pandemic strength, but there is some good news about Uchida and Padmore anyway. They have collaborated in Schubert again, this time in the recording studio. Their new Decca release partners Schubert’s Schwanengesang – a ‘swansong’ of 14 late songs marketed as a cycle by Schubert’s publisher after the composer had died – with Beethoven’s prototype song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte (‘To a distant beloved’).
Having pinned both singer and pianist to a Zoom call for an hour in their busy schedules, I first asked them about the different attitudes that Beethoven and Schubert had to writing for the voice. Is it too simplistic to say simply that Schubert loved the voice, and Beethoven didn’t?
‘You’re basically right,’ Padmore replies, ‘although it’s not so much that Beethoven doesn’t like the voice. Rather, he is sort of indifferent to the difficulties his demands make for singers. Just ask sopranos who have to sing in the chorus of the Missa solemnis or the Ninth Symphony. They are treated like cannon
