‘Winterreise’ gets a congenial video accompaniment

On the heels of a performance of George Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 in total darkness — perhaps the strongest possible case against giving listeners anything whatever to look at — came a version of Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise” with video commentary by the artist William Kentridge.

Kentridge’s staging, with the music performed by baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, was the inaugural presentation from SF Opera Lab, the San Francisco Opera’s experimental programming series at the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater.

The secret to that technique is Kentridge’s gift for mixing abstraction and concrete imagery in equal measure.

Mostly what they amount to are exquisitely high-end doodles: an office drone with a recalcitrant ink pad, shadowy birds flying overhead, a man hiking through the pages of an oversize dictionary, or elaborate geometrical shapes that shift in and out of definition.

There are many music lovers who regard Goerne as one of the great lieder singers of our day, and I envy their joy in his artistry without being able to join their number.

Hinterhäuser’s pianism did him no favors, either, opting for soggy, flat-footed rhythms in the cycle’s many slow songs and lapsing into vague approximation when the tempo sped up.