The Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin just completed its customary January week devoted to Schubert’s art song, with Thomas Hampson as guide and mentor.
The entire week’s worth of daily concerts, workshops, and conversations, which was streamed live from the hall, remains available online for another 30 days. The digital format also includes extended behind-the-scenes content on the songs and poems as well as interviews with some of the artists.
Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin today is starting its festival devoted to the lieder of Franz Schubert, curated by Thomas Hampson. I wrote about Schubert and his poets for the program (p. 31ff).
Goethe provided the source for more Schubert songs than any other poet. A sample:
Nähe des Geliebten
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ich denke dein, wenn mir der Sonne Schimmer
Vom Meere strahlt;
Ich denke dein, wenn sich des Mondes Flimmer
In Quellen malt.
Ich sehe dich, wenn auf dem fernen Wege
Der Staub sich hebt;
In tiefer Nacht, wenn auf dem schmalen Stege
Der Wandrer bebt.
Ich höre dich, wenn dort mit dumpfem Rauschen
Die Welle steigt.
Im stillen Hain da geh ich oft zu lauschen,
Wenn alles schweigt.
Ich bin bei dir, du seist auch noch so ferne.
Du bist mir nah!
Die Sonne sinkt, bald leuchten mir die Sterne.
O wärst du da!
Nearness of the Beloved
Here’s my review for Bachtrack of the third and final evening of the Schubert Trilogy recently performed by Mark Padmore and Kristian Bezuidenhout at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival:
‘Fremd’ is the very first word of the first song (‘Gute Nacht’) in Franz Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’. And the sensation of being a stranger, an alien among the signposts of ordinary life – with its cottages and mail coaches, its inns and stray dogs – imbued this interpretation of the entire 24-song cycle by the tenor Mark Padmore and the fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout.
In my latest Musical America piece (behind a paywall), I review the second program in the remarkable Schubert Trilogy from last week at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival.
Tenor Mark Padmore and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout teamed up for three evenings of Schubert lieder cycles (with a touch of Beethoven for the second program — Schwanengesang prefaced by An die ferne Geliebte, reviewed here). Here’s an excerpt:
In a brief introduction to his Tully Hall recital on Thursday, October 15, the tenor Mark Padmore remarked that the sense of longing encompassed by the German Sehnsucht — a word that defies easy translation — provided the link between the evening’s pair of cycles by Schubert and Beethoven, performed with keyboard partner Kristian Bezuidenhout.
[…]
The term recital sounds too coldly objective. Certainly it fails to do justice to the sense they achieved of a “through-composed” emotional journey, without the benefit of staging or design elements: Gesamtkunstwerk of music and poetry on an intimate scale….
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 