Brodsky Quartet session pics

This week the Brodsky Quartet were at Potton Hall, making their first album for Orchid.

Pictures: Patrick Allen

James Gilchrist blog

Jan 2010.

It's a few months now since Die Schöne Müllerin finally hit the shelves, and we have had a chance to draw breath and think about what we have managed to achieve. For Anna and me, the appearance of this disc was both an end and a beginning. An end for us, because we have wanted to record this piece for so many years, and have approached so many record companies to be turned down solely on the fact of my not being a native German speaker; and a beginning since, having found a company that seems to want to be bold and break out a little from the norms of the industry, we hope to be doing more!

DSM is a work Anna and I have performed more and more often through our (yikes!) twelve-year partnership, and recording it last year felt like the right time. It's the right way round to do things: to know a work inside out and then to set down a recorded version. In some ways the sessions themselves were the easiest bit: we knew what we wanted to say, and just had to hold in our minds the span and drama of a live performance. It is truly daunting to record such a well-known and well-recorded work. We felt that we had to hold onto our belief to do it how we felt right, and not worry about comparisons and critics and received opinion. We knew from our many live performances that though our approach delighted many, some were always troubled by the more drama-oriented stance, and felt offended that we couldn't "leave Schubert alone". I know what I think about leaving Schubert alone: he was 31 when he died, and did not have the Giant status he has rightly since acquired, and I'm quite sure that to demand a Schubertian "orthodoxy" is to lose the very heart of the passion that moved this young man to write such works of genius. Anna and I simply had to do it as we felt right, as we felt had moved the audiences we have stood in front of, and we had to trust our belief in the work and ourselves. To me, it's partly a mark of this music's greatness that it does really still speak through so many and such varied performances. But all this is easier said than done in such a cut-throat and public arena. So I must say, there was much nail-biting before the critical reception became known. And by and large, it did go down well. I think we haven't had such a consistently good field of reviews ever before, and we were really delighted.

Looking ahead, Orchid has asked us to record Winterreise and Schwanengesang. This is like a dream come true! The plan at the moment is to record in May, so now it's back to the huge task of coordinating another recording - booking venues, engineers, translators, coaches, writers, pianos and tuners. But the goal is in sight of setting down our vision of these works and to hope our freshness and belief in them comes out in a way that will move audiences and persuade them that English artists have something to say about great Austrian music. January in the snow seems like the right time to be thinking about a new winter journey.