One of my favorite contemporary composers and a fantastic young orchestra. Listening to this particular work is interesting, as I generally think of Golijov as a world music composer, and yet these songs must have fascinated the arranger so much that he would use his orchestration style to mingle with the Romanticism of Schubert. The result is a placid exhale of neo-romanticism that lingers on in my early morning, jet-lagged stupor.
I find this effect to be very different from the original Schubert piano-soprano arrangements, as the first three songs in the set Golijov used have much more Strum and Drang (This is fitting as the text is by Goethe). Take a listen and you’ll hear how Schubert’s more overt “longing” and “suffering” get bent into something more bittersweet and nostalgic. I think that this is partly due to the color changes that come from an orchestral arrangement.
I have the video of The Knights playing it below, and beneath the break are the original renditions of the songs by Schubert.