It’s always interesting when a top notch baritone (especially a native German speaker) and a first rate concert pianist get together to do Schubert’s Winterreise, which is, I suppose, the pinnacle of the Lieder repertory. That’s what we got at Koerner Hall on Thursday with a performance by Matthias Goerne and Daniil Trifonov.
The last concert of the season in the COC’s free concert season took place in the RBA on Thursday. It was the farewell concert for Queen Hezumuryango and Wesley Harrison plus a second farewell for Brian Cho and Mattia Senesi.
Schubert’s Four Seasons is a recital disk on the BIS label by soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Jioseph Middleton. It contains a generous 75 minutes of music made up of twenty Schubert songs about the seasons and nature generally (also death… there’s lots of death). Most of the songs are less well known ones but there are some more frequently heard one likes Die Forelle, Im Frühllind and Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (which also features Michael Collins on clarinet).
Once in a while I go out on a limb with recordings. Sometimes it’s great. I’m not as a rule particularly fond of “cross-over” material but I loved Emily D’Angelo’s freezing for example. So I took a listen to Schubert Beatles from the New York Festival of Song. Broadly speaking, it pairs Schubert Lieder with Beatles’ songs on a similar theme; Yesterday and Im Frühling for example. The Schubert is mostly presented pretty straight (except for guitar accompaniment on Du bist die Ruh). The Beatles songs are arranged, by Steven Beier, for various combinations of piano, violin, bass and guitar. The principal singer is baritone Theo Hoffman with tenor Andrew Owens and soprano Julia Bullock joining on some tracks. Continue reading
Wednesday’s lunchtime recital in the RBA was given by Wirth Vocal Prize winner Sara Schabas and pianist Alexey Shafirov. It was a varied and virtuosic programme. Five composers and five languages were involved and the works performed ranged in date from the 1815 to 2000.
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. Continue reading
Rachel Fenlon is a very rare, perhaps unique, talent. She’s the only Lieder singer I know who accompanies herself on the piano. I saw her perform live in Toronto back in 2018. It appears she spent lockdown isolated in a forest near Berlin studying Winterreise (as opposed to be eaten by goblins or kidnapped by elf kings) which she has now recorded. Many people would consider Winterreise as one of the epic challenges of the Lieder repertoire. It’s an hour and a quarter of songs that cover pretty much the whole technical and emotional range of Schubert’s Lieder. One might say the Everest of Lieder singing. To perform it self accompanied is kind of the equivalent of climbing solo without oxygen instead of with a bunch of mates and Sherpas to carry the gear. By that token perhaps we should consider Rachel the Reinhold Messner of Lieder singers!
Monday night in Walter Hall Toronto Summer Music continued with a concert by the new Orford Quartet (Jonathan Crow and Andrew Wan – violins, Sharon Wei – viola, Brian Manker – cello). I was there primarily to hear the première of Ian Cusson’s Dreams which was bookended on the programme by “Death and the Maiden” themed quartets in D minor by Mozart and Schubert.
Mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska made her Koerner Hall recital debut on Sunday afternoon just twenty-six years after first enrolling at the Royal Conservatory of Music. It was clearly an emotional occasion for her and justified the barely choked back tears in her introduction. The emotion though did not negatively affect her singing which was notable for, among other things, great control; emotionally and technically.
I’ve seen Schubert’s Winterreise done many ways. There’s the classic one with baritone and piano and more rarely soprano (including a memorable performance by Adrienne Pieczonka as a passing cold front battered the hall!). I’ve seen it done with projections and three singers and I’ve seen made into a film. So there’s nothing particularly outré about arranging it to add a choir to baritone and piano. The choir can function as Greek chorus or alter ego or whatever. Any way that’s what Gregor Meyer did and what the Toronto Mendelssohn Singers conducted by Jean-Sébastian Vallée performed when they joined forces with Brett Polegato and Philip Chiu at Trinity St. Paul’s on Saturday night.
operaramblings 