The graphics don't give you much information on what's going on here besides a small print listing of the instruments: what you have here is basically a klezmer version of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, D. 911. Die Winterreise has undergone various arrangements before, some of them wilder than this one, and there are various motivations for subjecting the song cycle to this treatment. First, as the members of Montreal's Le Chimera Project say, is "to find a way of divorcing ourselves from the media/scholarly ...
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The graphics don't give you much information on what's going on here besides a small print listing of the instruments: what you have here is basically a klezmer version of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, D. 911. Die Winterreise has undergone various arrangements before, some of them wilder than this one, and there are various motivations for subjecting the song cycle to this treatment. First, as the members of Montreal's Le Chimera Project say, is "to find a way of divorcing ourselves from the media/scholarly tradition and return to the music itself to see what it inspired in us." Another is to stress the simplicity of Schubert's melodies, their folkishness, and a third is to note how some of them entered the vernacular tradition, like street musicians playing tunes from Verdi operas. These goals don't always cohere, and in some of the songs, like Gefrorne Tränen (sample this), the accompaniment seems too peppy. The use of an actual hurdy-gurdy in Der Leiermann transforms a touching allusion...
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