Phänomen

Liv Redpath & Samuel Hasselhorn

Gaily in grief, 
I sing of love; 
joyful in woe, 
I weave my song; 
only those who long can tell what it means.
– Voice of the Woodbird (Siegfried) 

Singing about love’s deepest secrets: soprano Liv Redpath does so not only as the Waldvogel in Siegfried, but also on our recital stage. Together with Samuel Hasselhorn, First Prize at the 2018 Queen Elisabeth Competition (Voice), she opens the new Vocalissimo programme with lieder by Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann.  

Frisky songs of love alternate with desperate declarations in Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch (1890/91–96), a collection of forty-six short lieder that, thanks to their perfect symbiosis of poetic and musical evocation, are counted among the pinnacle of Late German Romanticism. A few years earlier, Wolf had already felt the same urge to compose when, utterly fascinated by the poetry of Eduard Mörike, he set no less than fifty-three of the latter’s poems to music in the space of nine months. Inspired by idyllic images of natural phenomena, they offer paintings of intimate feelings in which the crimson hue of Sehnsucht dominates. On this evening, a selection from both cycles will be grouped with songs by Robert Schumann in which the shimmering beauty of desire takes on almost cosmic dimensions. Haven’t we all, once, sensed their deeper meaning? 

As with the recital Transfiguration, this programme was jointly drawn up with pianist Inge Spinette who, after a long and splendid career as a song accompanist and répétiteur at La Monnaie, is now taking her leave.