What a relief to shelter from the sweltering heat and spend an hour with music of such radiance and beauty from a husband and wife dream team . A moving mixture of Schubert ‘Winterreise’ and Vaughan Williams ‘Songs of Travel’ . The programme is titled ‘Journey 100’, commemorating the 100thy anniversary of the birth of the German baritone Dietrich Fischer- Dieskau (1925- 2012) who was an enormously influential artist and for many ,his voice epitomises a refined lyrical ,articulate manner of performance through which the poetry shines. The programme’s journey visits two major,and very different, landmarks of music of music history’s large corpus of ‘wayfaring’ or ‘wandering’ songs.The splitting of cycles and the rapid moves between Schubert and Vaughan Williams encourage us to consider various things beyond their musical and poetic differences – the nature of song programming and performance norms over time, for instance, and the interventions made by composers, authors,performers,publishers and others that trouble perceptions of cycles solely as linear wholes.That this concert begins with ‘Der Leiermann’ uproots any preconceptions that the journey might be linear: the song’s status as the stark ending of Winterise is iconic, and placing it at the start allows us to encounter its eerie, repetitive sound-world without then weight of the 23 preceding songs, and without context for the protagonist’s unsettling questions. A beauty of diction that made the song sheet superfluous especially when the pianist could highlight and illuminate even the tinkle from a stray mobile! John Humphreys comments : ‘I had a mobile going off in ‘Der Leiermann’ once…stopped playing, silence, started again, same mobile ringing. To be fair the offender apologised afterwards and said she was phoning to see if someone could offer the organ grinder a bed for the night…!’ Wonderfully cool oasis of civilised culture whilst London seethes with scantily clad tourists intent on drinking the city dry !
In partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, Royaumont Abbey welcomes duos of young singers and pianists who have come to study art song and Lied. In this very unusual year...
Der Bariton Mikhail Timoshenko und die Pianistin Elitsa Desseva erhalten den Eduard-Erdmann-Förderpreis 2024. In ihrer Begründung würdigt die Jury die langjährige künstlerische Auseinandersetzung und das Engagement, mit dem sich das Liedduo für das Liedschaffen des Komponisten Eduard Erdmann (1896-1958) eingesetzt habe...
