Following on from his success as Escamillo in Bizet’s Carmen for State Opera South Australia, baritone Morgan Pearse has chosen to display another side to his talent with the intimacy of lieder and its beacon, Schubert’s Winterreise (1828). It is a foreboding, abstract work consisting of 24 rather fragmentary poems by Müller (who was also responsible for Die schöne Müllerin, which the composer had set approximately five years earlier in 1823). But with Winterreise Schubert had created something special, indeed unique. Here is a colossus of a work – a dark and troubling one which he knew was the best that he’d written. Its Byronic hero, a nameless figure whose name the listener never learns, becomes a figure for the ages to compare with the Wandering Jew, Camus’ L’Étranger, and even Kerouac. Is it a cycle for the young Romantic singer or the older experienced meistersinger? Peter Pears didn’t approach the work until he was 50, whilst the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau made his first public recording as early as 1948. In fact, Fischer-Dieskau would go on to record the cycle no less than eight times. Maybe it’s Schubert’s Lear whereby it is the éminence grise who are regarded as...