Schubert: Winterreise.(renditions from Franz Schubert)

* Bostridge; Andsnes, piano. Texts and translations. EMI Classics 7243 5 57790 2 1

It takes a lot of courage to record Schubert's peerless, devastating Winterreise: fully ninety-five (in and out of print) CDs are listed at a Winterreise website, including nine by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau alone! And yet four more have arrived in the past few months, including this version from the adventurous British tenor [an Bostridge. Those who think of Winterreise as a work for baritone will be startled by the higher keys used here in several numbers, but many of these are the original keys from Schubert's manuscripts (the composer himself apparently had a tenor voice), which were transposed down upon publication. The cycle's (appropriately) wandering range is demanding no matter how you slice it, but Bostridge, whose lower and middle registers have an unusually resonant, pervasive, baritonal coloring for a tenor, seems perfectly suited to it.

Bostridge's wanderer, though deeply wounded, is too refined a fellow to be dangerous. As a result, his range of emotional response is even more startling, as evidenced by, for example, the sardonic bitterness with which he stretches out the "r" of "r-r-r-r-eiche Brant!" at the end of "Die Wetterfahne," or the way he spits out the words "heiss" and "Eis" in "Gefror'ne Tranen" to reflect the physical pain caused by the extremes of heat and cold.

In truth, nearly any accomplished singer can give a good performance of the heartbreakingly beautiful "Gute Nacht," the surging, desperate "Erstarrung" or the roiling, thrilling "Ruckblick." It gets ...