A formidable team to tackle Schubert’s Everest of the lieder genre.

Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House

July 27, 2014

Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, 24 songs that plot the lonely hero’s descent into madness, has long been considered the Everest of the lieder genre.

A huge variety of singers have recorded attempts on this peak – expeditions by sopranos, tenors, baritones and even basses – and a fair share of those have ended up in the Himalayan death zone.

The 52-year-old Danish baritone Bo Skovhus is not one of them. He hasn’t even recorded it, despite having triumphs with Schubert’s other great cycles Schwanengesang and Die Schoene Mullerin, but this Utzon Series recital with Sydney-born conductor Simone Young on piano shows that it’s high time he took it into the recording studios.

Skovhus has an actor’s ability to inhabit his material – in this case the Romantic poems by Wilhelm Muller about a wanderer who is fated to be the outsider, seemingly mocked by nature and spurned by humanity.

His voice was soft and supplicating in the lovely The Linden Tree, in whose shadow he dreamed many a sweet dream, switching to urgent and powerful in Flood Water where his tears join the...