Tag: lieder
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PROGRAM NOTES: EMA NIKOLOVSKA
Mezzo-soprano Eva Nikolovska has curated an intriguing recital program of songs composed in the forty years between 1865 and 1905, a selection that highlights the changing styles of music emanating from three important centres of music-making. From Vienna there are the contrasting voices of the traditionalist Brahms and his aesthetic adversary Hugo Wolf, from France…
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PROGRAM NOTES: SIR SIMON KEENLYSIDE
Johannes Brahms Songs from Opp. 6, 72, 86 & 96 It may be surprising to learn that while Brahms is universally revered as a giant of 19th-century instrumental music, he is often listed as one of the lesser composers of 19th-century art song. This may be because the texts he chose to set were for…
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PROGRAM NOTES: JULIA BULLOCK & JOHN ARIDA
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Four Lieder About the Composer Franz Schubert established the German lied as an important art form and then set a standard of excellence that no one since has quite matched. Schubert created more than 600 songs in a prodigious outpouring that sometimes saw him composing five songs in a single day. However,…
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PROGRAM NOTES: IAN BOSTRIDGE & WENWEN DU
Franz Schubert Winterreise It is a fact of musical life that there are commonly accepted ‘right’ ways (and even more ‘wrong’ ways) of performing the great works of past. These works arrive on our music stands embedded with notions of ‘stylistic correctness’ that guide our first attempts at interpretation, serving the same function as the lines…
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PROGRAM NOTES: LUCA PISARONI & WOLFRAM RIEGER
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Four Songs The earliest German lieder we have in the concert repertoire come from the more than 30 works that Mozart wrote between 1768 (at the age of twelve!) and his death in 1791. His mature songs reflect his skill as an opera composer in their sensitive treatment of the text, bolstered by…
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PROGRAM NOTES: CHRISTIAN GERHAHER & GEROLD HUBER
By Christian Gerhaher This programme of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set to music by Franz Schubert and Wolfgang Rihm was conceived as a tribute to the eight great poetic hymns written during the poet’s Sturm und Drang period of the 1770s and 1780s. I had always regretted that Schubert had set only three…
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PROGRAM NOTES: GERALD FINLEY & JULIUS DRAKE
Franz Schubert: Die Winterreise The art songs of Franz Schubert lie at the foundation of the lied genre itself, and at the pinnacle of Schubert’s lieder output stands Die Winterreise, a song cycle remarkable for its vivid musical portraits of the human heart smarting from the pains of love lost, and stoically resigned to the…
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GETTING TO KNOW BARITONE CHRISTIAN GERHAHER
Christian Gerhaher on the origins on German Lied (song): The German Lied was born into quite special circumstances. The composer found himself creating something with no pre-existing format, which in practical performance terms was restricted to a quite intimate situation, which will later become the famous Schubertiade. That means it had a more social than…
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LEILA GETZ: ONE OF THE MOST PERFECT CONCERT EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE
Last night I had one of the most perfect concert experiences of my life. I have been attending a conference of music managers and presenters in Budapest. I discovered that baritone Christian Gerhaher was singing an all-Schubert song recital in the Vienna Konzerthaus. It was sold out, but after 33 years in the concert presenting…
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PROGRAM NOTES: CHRISTIAN GERHAHER AND ANDRÁS SCHIFF
Ludwig van Beethoven An die ferne Geliebte Adelaide, Op. 46 An die ferne Geliebte, composed in 1816, stands proudly at the beginning of Christian Gerhaher’s recital as the first important song cycle from any composer, that is, a series of songs in which the constituent numbers are linked together by a theme or narrative of…
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AN INTERVIEW WITH FLORIAN BOESCH
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. How did the New Year start for you? The New Year started with a Messiah concert in Zurich and then 5 days skiing with the kids and friends in Vorarlberg. That‘s a very good start! Who are the great influences in your life and in…
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PROGRAM NOTES: FLORIAN BOESCH
A recital of Lieder set exclusively to poems of Heinrich Heine and composed solely by Schubert and Schumann is particularly apt inasmuch as Heine was born the same year as Schubert (1797) and died the same year as Schumann (1856). He was not only one of Germany’s leading romantic authors, he also wrote about travel,…
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GETTING TO KNOW: SIMON KEENLYSIDE
“I am a story teller, I am a narrator.” “I spend my entire working life dealing only with beauty; I rarely sing with a piece of music in front of me, so all of these beautiful songs are committed to memory.” Performing opera does not come without its risks: injuring his back in one…