I recently bought the Yuri Honing and Nora Mulder CD Winterreise on Amazon. Winterreise recorded on saxophone? How interesting! Unfortunately, the disappointments started as soon as I turned the (cardboard) box over. Contrary to what the cover implies, the disc does not contain the complete cycle of Winterreise performed on saxophone. The thirteen-track disc contains twelve songs for Winterreise, in seemingly random order, and then ends with Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen.

Saxophone Yuri Honing Winterreise

While I bought the album for its novelty appeal, I must admit I had some hope that the saxophone would somehow transcend language and get right to the heart of dense music; expressing lonely longing and tender heartbreak. How wrong I was. While I still maintain that such a recording could be made, this album is not.

Moulder’s piano playing is clearly capable and manages to capture all the notes and dynamics just right, but it still sounds more like pressing a button than expressive music.

The strangest thing about this recording is the metronomic rhythmic precision with which it is performed. For a jazz musician, playing a jazz instrument in a style known for its rhythmic give-and-take, one might expect Honing and Mulder to allow the emotional lyric line to influence, in some way, the rigidity of the written rhythm. Unfortunately, they don’t do anything of the sort.

An exception to this unfortunate rule is Der Leiermann, which is the third track and appears only as “No. 24”. Some rhythmic freedom is allowed here, at the expense of the piano. Yes, that’s right, the piano part has been replaced by rests. Except for about two bars in the middle where he mysteriously returns for a surprise visit only to leave again just as mysteriously. This same arrangement of “dropping the piano part waiting for a random interjection in the middle” applies to Das Wirtshaus, or as they call it: “No. 21”.

Contempt for the cycle’s poetic content pervades the production: songs are thrown out of order, nullifying plot movement, and songs that made it to disc are listed by number rather than title. However, the lack of words becomes especially noticeable when Honing repeats notes. For a singer, repeated notes generally carry a new syllable and thus have an inherent lyricism. Unfortunately, that is lost on Honing, who seems to see only a line of small black dots and interprets them as such.

It’s a real shame, and a black eye for players everywhere, that this recording was a flop. Instrumental music has the ability to fly beyond the emotional confines of language, but by performing poetry-based music and not acknowledging it, they ended up with the worst of both worlds.

However, as artistically barren as this recording may be, the novelty music lover in me is still very glad to have it. I mean, it’s Winterreise on the fucking saxophone!