Is there a right voice for a cycle of songs such as Schubert’s Die Winterreise? If you ask around, I guess that the off-the-cuff answer would be “the baritone”. I can see why. These songs have a dark, brooding mood that suit the baritone voice (and the lower edition makes the piano also less bright in sound). But what about the bass voice? Kurt Moll recorded it, Karl Ridderbusch too, and Theo Adam, Robert Holl later, even Marti Talvela did. Do we mention these recordings in our Winterreise shortlists? Most of them are indeed out of print. When I read that Georg Zeppenfeld was to sing this cycle in a Liederabend at the Opernhaus Zürich, I realized I had never seen a bass sing it at all. To be honest, I wouldn’t be naturally inclined to choose the bass voice for this cycle. Romantic poetry involves behaviours that you wouldn’t associate to maturity – and the bass voice is usually chosen to portray fathers, kings and gods.
In terms of voice alone, Georg Zeppenfeld is a paragon of excellence. His bass is velvety, full, voluminous, resonant in its bottom register and firm in its high notes – and he scales down to softer dynamics without any trouble. He ticks two important items in my checklist for Lieder recitals. One – he has a substantial voice, and I happen to find it refreshing to hear a singer undisturbed by having to send his voice to the last seat in the hall (as it sometimes happens in Liederabende). Second – he is not afraid of using his voice. This means, he unleashes the full Wagnerian scope when he wants. This is a matter of taste, of course, but – judge me – I find lilliputian Schubert boring. That said, the impression of hearing a Francisco Araiza or a Brigitte Fassbaender unleashing their voices in this repertoire is hardly stentorian, as when you have a bass singing it. The impression of authority and command of a singer like Mr. Zeppenfeld in these songs place him in an entirely different emotional level of the young man in the poem. The expressive realm we’re talking about here has more to do with Gurnemanz narrating the events in the act one of Wagner’s Parsifal than with the vulnerability, hopelessness and depression the character in the poems experience. This – and the fact that the approach to phrasing here is really German (funny as it sounds) – made this Liederabend admirable rather than touching. Mr. Zeppenfeld’s narrative style in this songs turns around the clear delivery of the text in his crystalline diction and finding the right accent and colouring for every word rather than relishing the natural flow of the phrase, making it very cerebral and rather short in sensuousness. And there’s plenty of room for it in songs like Rast or Einsamkeit. He would be far more comfortable in numbers energetic in nature that required some sort of dramatic impact, such as Der stürmische Morgen or Mut, which made me remember that he was such a terrific Kaspar when I saw him in Weber’s Der Freischütz in Dresden.
Gerold Huber was the ideal accompanist for Mr. Zeppenfeld’s Gurnemanz-ian singing of this cycle. His piano was large in sound, unashamedly pedalled and bold in accent. Maybe to adjust for the singer’s weight of voice, tempi tended at first to be a tad slower than I was used (what further challenged the use of legato in the vocal part too), but then I realized that this applied only to the more meditative items. Songs like Frühlingstraum or Der Lindenbaum had an almost objective pace to them.
Surprisingly for Zurich, both artists received a standing ovation, a well-deserved one. This was an important voice, guided by masterly technique, accompanied by a pianist who not only knew to adjust to the scale of the singer and also to the kind of expressive goal established here. The joy of Lieder singing certainly is the possibility of hearing someone’s personal angle on texts and music the audience know well, even if by the end of the night one’s affinities lie somewhere else.
I HEAR VOICES 
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