The Schubertíada Vilabertran begins the day after tomorrow. This is the second post about its song recitals; last week we reviewed the first three of them, the last of which was that of Matthias Goerne and Alexander Schmalcz, on 21 August. This week we will go over four more.

August has arrived and with it the posts dedicated to the Schubertíada Vilabertran com. This year we have eleven song recitals, no more no less. As usual, we'll go over the songs programmed in those concerts that we heard on Liederabend so far, so as you can prepare the recital, in case you're attending it. If you're missing it, I hope that you would like to listen again to some of them; For all of you, we'll have, as always, a new song every week.

Art Song speaks about life. If you read interviews we read interviews with performers you'll notice that's a usual statement. That's why Art Song is a current genre and that is why the letter V of the Liederabend's alphabet is for vida, life.

Art Song speaks about life because poetry does, of course. The words used by poets four hundred years ago are different from those used one hundred years ago or those that they use today, but their interests remain essentially the same at any time.

The Thirty Years' War was one of the most terrible episodes in the History of Europe. Officially, it was a war of religions, which began in 1618 with the so-called "defenestration of Prague" and ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Of course, the real reason wasn't the disputes between Catholics and Protestants but a political struggle (in fact, there were odd alliances between Catholic and Protestant kings, nothing unites as much as a common enemy), besides, the fact that three ambassadors of the Holy Roman Emperor were thrown out of a window of a castle in Prague was just an anecdote (except for the ambassadors [...]

I've always been interested in learning about the way our brain 'listens': why do we passionately love some pieces of music whereas some others fail to move us? While preparing this article, an old post explaining something about this subject came to my mind: in short, like it or not, music depends on the balance between what we anticipate, because it's known, and what surprises us, because it's new.