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A traditional Lieder programme at the Edinburgh International Festival brings songs concerned with love, celebrating its joys but more often lamenting its loss and its pains. 

A program of Schumann and Brahms fails to cohere due to fussy mannerisms and tentative playing. 

Brad Mehldau’s song cycle is a disappointment, the texts selected under the rubric of “desire” proving a major concern.

Birthday concerts are strange things. If a hall is going to celebrate your birthday, you'd want to be in the audience and have some of your favourite musicians entertain you.

The gifted baritone Rafael Fingerlos lit up Lucerne’s Lukaskirche with Dichterliebe, the song cycle of 16 poems by Heinrich Heine.

Despite some fascinating, impressive and often beautiful moments, the consistent refusal to give the audience time to applaud, pause and digest what they had just heard turned the evening into a wash of death songs.

Baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Daniil Trifonov combined their talents to explore the darker side of human existence in an intense, uninterrupted 90-minute recital.

Tézier, with his beautifully full, easy baritone sound and reputation for attention to diction is a singer I have appreciated on stage for some time and was looking forward to his rising to the challenge of a solo evening with his audience. 

If this first song recital of the season is any indication of the level we can expect at the Konzerthaus, lovers of Lieder are in for a real treat. Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber set the bar very high last night in a hefty program including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and a dozen other songs, a set of Fauré, and the world première of a song cycle by Jörg Widmann.

The sharp linguistic and enunciative abilities of Romanian mezzo Adriana Festeu are as impressive as her singing. Accompanied by Nico de Villiers, she launched “Leeds Lieder+ From Europe to America – A Day of Song” in the morning at Leeds University’s Clothworkers Hall with “Songs My Mother Taught Me”. She dealt very convincingly with Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs in Czech, followed by 5 Lieder, Op.

In a programme entitled “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen” (“A Young Man Loves a Girl”), the young baritone Tobias Berndt performed a selection of Romantic German Lieder in Freiburg’s Historisches Kaufhaus, culminating in Robert Schumann’s (1810-56) much-loved song cycle Dichterliebe.

Among the audience at Thursday night’s Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital, it seemed few had heard of baritone Christian Gerhaher. They had come for the excellent reason of András Schiff playing the piano. But by the end of the evening it was clear that neither name would be soon forgotten.

This was the first concert of Oxford Lieder's new season, and setting the bar pleasingly high for those who will come after was the partnership of tenor John Mark Ainsley, veteran of concert and opera stage alike, and Roger Vignoles, a name synonymous with the highest levels of professionalism in the accompaniment of song.