September is here! Welcome back if you were on holiday during the last weeks. I wish you all a great Art Song season! A new season begins, but summer is still in the air, so I suggest a musical trip until the next city break comes. A few years ago, Wolf and Mörike took us to their island, Orplid, the first week of September and today, Britten and Auden will take us to theirs. Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden first met in the summer of 1935, when the General Post Office Film Unit hired them to write music and text, respectively, to their documentaries. Cinema was the new mass media and both welcomed that opportunity to reach a wide audience. Auden was twenty-seven and had received recognition for his first volumes of poetry; Britten was twenty-one and had just left the Royal College of Music. His training was essentially musical and, for his inclinations, very [...]

 

My dearest all, August and the 2016-2017 season are both ending this week (and I hope many of you are still on holidays!). Other years, we arrived at this point with those posts dedicated to the Schubertíade Vilabertran, but this year it wasn't possible because of the festival's schedule. So, I had to think of something short and light (summer posts are supposed to be short and light) and I remembered a few things I ‘ve gathered and could share with you.

 

This post is the third, and the last one dedicated to the programmes of song recitals at the Schubertiade Vilabertran. Malcolm Martineau is one of the main artists this year, with three recitals, all of them scheduled this week: tomorrow with Sarah Connolly (I talked about it last week), the day after tomorrow with Kate Royal and on Saturday with Christoph Prégardien. You can't imagine how much I'm looking forward to them!.

 

The Schubertíade Vilabertran opens tomorrow, the 25th edition, and as you know, it begins with a song recital with Ilker Arcayürek and Wolfram Rieger; I talked about it last week. Today, we will focus on the two next recitals, those of Matthias Goerne and Alexander Schmalcz on 22th and Sarah Connolly and Malcolm Martineau on 24th, and next week I'll talk about the last two recitals, that of Kate Royal on 25th and Christoph Prégardien on 26th, both with Malcolm Martineau too.

 

Presenting the song recitals at the Schubertíade Vilabertran is becoming a tradition here on Liederabend. The festival's schedule rules our postings and this year, four out of five recitals will take place during the same week (and what a great week that will be!), so we'll devote only three posts to them. Today's post is about the opening recital, on August 17, with Ilker Arcayürek and Wolfram Rieger; Next weeks’ will be on recitals by Matthias Goerne and Alexander Schmalcz and Sarah Connolly and Malcolm Martineau and the third one will be on recitals by Kate Royal and Christoph Prégardien, both again with Malcolm Martineau. As always, they will be short posts where I'll go over the songs we have already heard and suggest a new one.