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A deep-dive into the world of 14th-century Persian poet, Hafez, and his influence on song across the centuries. 

The final day of Oxford Lieder's 80-event festival was framed by two recitals taking us from the world of German folklore andDes Knaben Wunderhorn, to the pain and drama of romantic entanglements. 

The tone was set for a shrewdly programmed hour of contrasts.

If Chest is not yet the finished article, he’s damned close.

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.

Barbara Hannigan joined pianist Reinbert de Leeuw for a Second Viennese School recital at the Park Avenue Armory.

A programme of songs by Wolf, Strauss, and Scandinavian composers, with Iréne Theorin and Ulrika Tenstam.

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.

As part of the Konzerthaus’ Mittagsmusik (Midday Music) series, young soprano Anna Lucia Richter teamed up this week with one of the greatest living song accompanists, Gerold Huber, to present an extraordinarily varied matinée of songs in the Schubertsaal.

Songs of the Sea, the opening concert of the Leeds Lieder Festival, leaves the audience in a happy and buoyant mood.

Gansch and Martineau fail to dazzle in an unchallenging programme of bucolic and playful Lieder.

Spirited and nuanced string playing from the Australian Chamber Orchestra with guest violinist Stefan Jackiw and bassist Maxime Bibeau in a program that began and ended with Mendelssohn.

John Woolrich is a publically undervalued contributor to British musical life. This evening’s concert attempted to celebrate as many of the man’s musical guises as possible.

Soprano Anna Lucia Richter sings Schubert and Wolf with tonal beauty and eloquent intensity, sensitively and unerringly accompanied by Gerold Huber.

They whistle, they compose, they parody and they certainly can play. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Amarcord Wien are kings of their realm.

The duo toss off three encores before breezing off into the night, sending their audience off to their beds, already completely and utterly satisfied. 

Michael Schade and Justus Zeyen perform songs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Josef Marx, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf in Vienna's Konzerthaus.

A magnificent evening of lieder from Thomas Hampson with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in crisp accompaniment.

A stunning collaboration between Hampson and Amsterdam Sinfonietta at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, with works by Schoenberg, Wolf, Schubert and Barber.

Simon Keenlyside and Graham Johnson's concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus featured songs by Schoenberg and his pupil Hanns Eisler, as well as Britten, Wolf, Schubert and Brahms. These consummate artists made a difficult program seem easy to perform and even easier to listen to.

The evening began on a fun note: Juliane Banse’s voice rang out in a pre-recorded message, reminding the audience that as far as she knew, cell phones and classical music did not generally mix. After a community chuckle, the audience applauded Banse, Bo Skovhus and Helmut Deutsch onto the stage, and then settled back into its seats for an evening of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch.

The penultimate concert in a three-year project to record the complete songs of Hugo Wolf, this Oxford Lieder Festival concert’s programme was based around settings of Goethe.

It was hard to choose from the fascinating menu for The Composer’s Echo (the title for this Leeds Lieder Festival), which is described as “a feast of song from the great Western European tradition which fuses poetry and music” by the festival’s director, Jane Anthony.

Twentysomething Philippe Sly wields an impressive voice. Like the mythical John Henry’s hammer, it rings like silver in the upper register, the middle shines like gold, and his bass is firm as iron. From the second line of Henri Duparc’s “Chanson Triste” Sly interested with his way of rolling out phrases, englobing lines in cavernous spaces.

In one of Europe’s hottest capitals (that day), a sizeable Edinburgh crowd gathered in the shade of the Dovecot Studios for this season’s final RSNO chamber concert.

Centered around the later, lesser-known composers of art song, tonight’s programme started with a first half of melancholy Hugo Wolf Lieder. Both Schubert and Schumann wrote settings of Goethe’s unhappy Harfenspieler, but evidently Wolf was unsatisfied, as, on principle, he avoided setting texts which he thought had been successfully treated before.

Bass-baritone Eric Owens is no stranger to Bay Area voice aficionados. After making his local debut as Lodovico in Otello with San Francisco Opera in 2002, Owens memorably created the diet-regiment-reciting General Leslie Groves there in the world première of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in 2005. Most recently he did yeoman's work with a smaller role in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi in October.

There’s nothing like a festival coming to your neighbourhood to highlight gaps in local knowledge. Despite having grown up 12 miles from Dunbar, I’d never spotted, far less entered, St Anne’s Episcopal Church. It is a gem of a place with a superb chamber music acoustic.

Those few seconds of breathless silence at the end of a recital before thunderous applause are a rare thing, and a sure sign that the evening has been a success. Such was the case at the Wigmore Hall on Wednesday night after Roderick Williams and Gary Matthewman were called back to the stage for a second encore.

Susan Graham is the mezzo representative of the generation of American singers, including Barbara Bonney, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw and Sylvia McNair, who rose to prominence in the mid to late 1980s and distinguished themselves internationally with their superlative techniques, gorgeous lyric instruments, and impeccable professionalism.

Lieder recitals at the Wigmore Hall are usually very popular, so I was quite surprised at the number of empty seats at Monday’s BBC Lunchtime Concert by the distinguished tenor Christoph Prégardien and Christoph Schnackertz.

On Sunday afternoon the most recent recipient of the prestigious Kathleen Ferrier Award, Kitty Whately, was welcomed to the Clothworkers’ Hall by Leeds Lieder, an organisation founded in the hope of introducing art song to a new audience.

The string quartet is a peculiar beast in the classical music world. It takes a dash of talent, a sprinkling of luck, and a lot of social skills to make it in a professional, full-time string quartet. Many quartets are plagued with internal conflicts and member changes; however, the Lafayette Quartet seems to have defied the statistics in this category, almost miraculously.

Florian Boesch reminded me of the terror I felt as a nine year-old boy treble: I had to walk home in the dark after rehearsing Schubert's version of The Erlking, with phantoms following.

Since emerging from the Guildhall School of Music in the early 1990s, Roderick Williams has enjoyed a steady and critically acclaimed career.

How tempting it can be for the aficionado of German Lieder to stay at home and never to go to concerts. He (yes, it is normally a he rather than a she) can retreat into his LP and CD collection, and convince himself that the great recordings of a Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau or an Elisabeth Schwarzkopf cannot be surpassed.

The Holywell Music Room in Oxford, with its bright and reverberant sound, was purpose-built as a concert hall, and opened in 1748. To hear four experienced and top-class singers last night, all of whom were able to work the specifics of this unique and historic room, to sing to it and use it as their instrument, was sheer joy.

Anna Lucia Richter se estrena en el XXVII Ciclo de Lied del CNDM con una excelente selección de lieder de Mahler, Wolf y Schubert.

Stéphane Degout et Cédric Tiberghien proposaient aux Bouffes du Nord un riche programme, mêlant mélodie et lied pour une soirée riche en contrastes. 

La mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink et le pianiste Roger Vignoles ont proposé à l’Auditorium du Musée d’Orsay un récital qui clôturait la première année de l’Académie Orsay-Royaumont, dédiée à la mélodie et au lied.

El XXV Ciclo de Lied cerró con un programa representativo en lo que a este repertorio se refiere: Schubert, Schumann, Brahms o Wolf, en una velada que se articuló a través de la alternancia de lieder, dúos, melodramas y poesías recitadas con Thomas Quasthoff, Michael Schade y Florian Boesch.

Mit Liedern von Schubert, Rihm, Wolf und Berg ziehen Gerhaher und Huber das Publikum in ihren Bann.

Soutenus par l’irréprochable Helmut Deutsch, l'Italienisches liederbuch de Jonas Kaufmann et Diana Damrau babillait, roucoulait, allégeant considérablement le style au demeurant sophistiqué d’Hugo Wolf.

Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto pléthorique offre un récital jubilatoire soutenu par un Roger Vignoles royal ; malheureusement la truculence déjà légendaire de la cantatrice semble bien mal adaptée à l’exercice du récital.

Die Amsterdam Sinfonietta überzeugt im Wiener Konzerthaus mit einem anregenden Programm im Zeichen der Moderne.

Matthias Goerne cierra de forma sublime un nuevo capítulo de esta temporada de Lied del CNDM, acompañado por el gran pianista Alexander Schmalcz, y con un repertorio monográfico en torno a la muerte.