The Schubertíada begins in a week and I'm starting with this post the miniseries about the recitals there. As usual, they'll be shorter posts that intend to be useful to refresh the Lieder performed at the festival.

To begin with, the two first recitals, those of Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau on Thursday 20 and Juliane Banse and Wolfram Rieger on Friday 21. The first duo will perform Die schöne Müllerin and the second one, Winterreise.

Last week we said goodbye until next year to the students of the Master in Lied of the ESMUC, next week we'll start to talk about the recitals of the Schubertíada and in the meantime, I propose a trip by sea that, as you will see, is not a pleasure trip.

When one’s profession is being a musician, one enters a world in which if not all, most people that surround us don't understand what we do. I’m talking about the world of classical music, an unknown world for a big percentage of the world’s population, which in itself could be divided into sub-worlds: early music, opera, orchestras... and so on. Still, there are composers whose names go far beyond the borders of those sub-worlds and even the world of classical music; because of the diversity of their works, the volume of their work, their undisputable geniality or their very fortunate circumstances in the history of western music. [...]

For a human being, accepting a tragedy such as the death of the beloved ones is an extremely difficult task. This was the situation which devastated the young writer Elisabeth Kulmann (1808-1825) when, as a child, she lost her father and her six brothers in the war, as a result she only had her mother’s support to face pain and misery, the situation being worsened by the dire poverty in which they lived. Far from sinking into despair, mother and daughter were able to cope with adversity and Elizabeth had a [...]

Today I want to share with you a beautiful Lied composed by a wonderful woman, Clara Schumann. Clara Schumann was born in a time when the status of the woman was still associated to a life dedicated to the home, letting to the men the occupations outside of home. Although of that, her life was very opposite to the one she was supposed to have: since a very early age, her father, a outstanding piano teacher, gave her a wide musical education, and she evolved in a great concert pianist career which brought her to the most famous international music stages and gave her lots of fame.