Bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni is currently appearing as Basilio in The Barber of Seville at the COC. On Tuesday he gave a noon hour recital in the RBA accompanied by Hyejin Kwon. There were two halves to the programme; Schubert’s Schwanengesang D.957 and a set of six Italian songs by Francesco Paolo Tosti.
Despite having seen Pisaroni live twice before in recital I’d never heard him sing German Lieder so the Schubert was especially interesting. It was good. He can be as dramatic or as lyrical as he needs to be with quite a range of dynamics and colour. “Der Atlas” was powerful and emphatic while “Das Fischermädchen” was really rather lovely. “Der Doppelgänger” was very controlled with any temptation to over sing it resiosted. I also noted some really interesting piano playing in “Die Stadt”. Continue reading
Lines of Life is a CD produced out of a deep collaboration between German baritone Benjamin Appl and Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It’s a mixture of works by Schubert and Kurtág (with one song by Brahms at the end). It centers on Kurtág’s Hölderlin-Gesänge Op.35a but there are other Kurtág works on the disk too, Most of these are sung a capella but there are four settings of texts by Ulrike Schuster that have piano accompaniment (Pierre-Laurent Aimard). The Schubert songs feature James Baillieu on piano except for the last one, and the Brahms, where Kurtág himself accompanies. 
Rachel Fenlon is a very rare, perhaps unique, talent. She’s the only Lieder singer I know who accompanies herself on the piano. 
operaramblings 