Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Liederkreis, Op.39

An old instrument, a veteran star singer, and a late rose all bloom at Oxford's annual songfest.

Mark Padmore's fine Wigmore Hall recital could have borne the title The Fallen Man as two of the works chart the downfall of men, albeit in very different ways. 

Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber leave the audience speechless in Madrid with an all-Schumann recital in an evening that will not easily be forgotten.

With all the attention rightly focused on the demise of the Minnesota Orchestra and the New York City Opera, it would be easy to believe that the musical arts are in dire straits in America. In some ways they are. But from the funding rubble of the financial crisis new groups and new facilities are sprouting too.

The baritone Thomas Hampson is a popular figure at the Salzburg Festival, having appeared there regularly since 1988, and at his Lieder recital with pianist Wolfram Rieger at the Haus der Mozart, one sensed a warm rapport between him and the audience. His programme consisted of Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, Dvořák’s Zigeunermelodien and Mahler’s songs based on the text of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.

Many writers dream of having letters after their name, particularly if those letters are -esque. The idea that one's prose style prompts recognition and imitation has an obvious appeal. Few could have been more surprised at attracting this suffix than Franz Kafka (1883–1924) who, having had no novels published in his lifetime urged, without success, the posthumous destruction of his opus.