Schubert’s Winterreise with Philipp Stäudlin

Our collaboration was reviewed by Steve Marrone in the The Boston Musical Intelligencer on February 11, 2009.

“The concert given at the Goethe Institut of Boston on Sunday, February 8, featured John McDonald’s new composition for alto sax and piano, Stäudlin as Vogl: Preamble to a Winter Journey, an idea proposed by Philipp Stäudlin, his colleague in the Tufts University Music Department. It was followed by the whole of Schubert’s Winterreise. A year of rehearsing brought McDonald to see Stäudlin on the saxophone in something of the light in which Schubert looked upon his own favorite singer, Johann Michael Vogl- that is, as both muse and angel; accompanying a saxophone instead of a voice brought him an entirely different understanding of the Schubert. McDonald’s piece is clever, hardly to be grasped in just one hearing. It works wonders to put the listener in a frame of mind anticipating Schubert’s more massive composition. Spare but never timid or understated, McDonald’s music evokes Schubert’s, sometimes melodically, often by rhythm and dynamics; but it also stands on its own as a sort of minimalist representation of the passions running through the original work. Stäudlin and McDonald worked through Schubert’s entrancing but profoundly disturbing material in Winterreise with a magic of their own. What a stroke of genius to play the work this way. Even Schubert would have discovered something in the music he had not known was there before.”As the title of McDonald’s new work suggests, a year of rehearsing brought him to see Stäudlin on the saxophone in something of the light in which Schubert looked upon his own favorite singer, Johann Michael Vogl – that is, as both muse and angel: “muse,” because listening to Stäudlin’s playing inspired him to write his own duet for piano and sax; and “angel” in the original sense of “messenger,” because accompanying a saxophone instead of a voice brought him an entirely different understanding of the Schubert.”