Konzertexamen Recital

RÉCITAL DE KEIGO MUKAWA ET RYAN ZHU

Sabine Devieilhe / Song Recital

French singer Sabine Devieilhe is currently on a roll. The Opéra National de Paris, the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, the festival in Aix-en-Provence, the Bavarian State Opera, the Salzburg Festival – everyone is clamouring for her clear-as-a-bell soprano. She recently impressed in the Elbphilharmonie as Micaëla in Georges Bizet’s opera »Carmen«. Fortunately, she is not only addicted to opera, but also to song. Together with her long-time piano partner Mathieu Pordoy, she sings her way through a whole cosmos of loving lullabies by Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss and Edvard Grieg at the Elbphilharmonie. In the second half of the concert, she juxtaposes Strauss’ »Mädchenblumen« about four female characters with the female perspective of Lili Boulanger’s songs. With works by Germaine Tailleferre and Cécile Chaminade, Devieilhe brings two other French female composers to the stage who otherwise often lag behind the voices of their male colleagues. Of course, the chanson icon Édith Piaf and her »Hymne à l’amour« should not be missing in such a frenzy of love.

Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

Gustav Mahler’s development and work as a composer focussed mainly on two musical genres: symphony and Lied (song). Again and again, the two very different forms approached each other, but the combination of the monumentality of the symphony and the intimacy of the song reached a hymn-like climax in »Das Lied von der Erde«. A compositional legacy based on texts by Hans Bethge that Mahler left to the world, knowing full well that his own death was already waiting for him at the next corner. Arnold Schönberg arranged Mahler’s final song for a chamber orchestra for the concerts of the »Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen«, a work that was finally completed by Rainer Riehn. The arrangement for chamber orchestra turned Mahler’s composition into a masterpiece of its own kind, in which the essence of the original sound is preserved through careful reduction and transformed into a new quality of characterisation and emotional experience.

Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

The works in this chamber music concert are all about love and connection, in words and through sound: when Johannes Brahms set about composing »Zwei Gesänge«, he had his close friendship with his long-time companion in mind, the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms wanted to create a musical memorial to his love and composed the »Geistliches Wiegenlied« for his wedding, based on a text by Emanuel Geibel, but he withdrew the composition and revised it. Together with »Gestillte Sehnsucht« based on a text by Friedrich Rückert, the composer later published both songs on the occasion of another happy event: the christening of Joseph Joachim’s son – and Brahm’s godson.

Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

This chamber music concert demonstrates how often music finds words for the inexpressible: Hugo Wolf composed his »Italian Serenade« for strings as an homage to the light-heartedness of his youth. If the tone in this work is cheerful, his songs reveal a different facet of the composer. In them, he attempted to unmask the masking of people, full of impressive authenticity and deep emotion. His Intermezzo in E flat major, which Wolf wrote a year before the Italian Serenade, is filled with elegy and hopeful passion. A composer’s life that wavered repeatedly between heaven and the abyss.

Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

Richard Strauss’ »Capriccio« seems remote from the world, in the face of the cruelty witnessed in the Second World War. The musical means of the late 19th century are used here in the 20th century to describe the time of the late 18th century. In the string sextet where the action begins, the »rapture« from earth is captured as though in a tableau. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third String Quartet was also thought to not be of its time, in a very different way. Described as the »patchwork of a madman«, this »crazy« music was met with incomprehension by the public. Beethoven though was deliberately seeking to challenge expectations when he took chamber music out of the living room and into the major concert halls of the day.

Philharmonic Chamber Music Recital

This concert takes you on a musical voyage through the history of four female composers and one of the most underestimated female figures in opera history. It begins with Louise Farrenc – an exceptional figure of her time: as a pianist, professor, publisher, cultural manager and mother, she stands both as a pivotal figure in French music, and as an icon of creative combativeness.

Récital de Marcelo Alvarez, ténor

Katharina Konradi / Catriona Morison / Song Recital

France calls the German art song »Le lied«. This resonates respect for this world-famous phenomenon, but also a lot of autonomy at the same time. The French art song is actually very self-confidently called »mélodie«. With Katharina Konradi and Catriona Morison, two equally top-class singers present a programme which delightfully contrasts Schumann and Brahms’ songs with their French contemporaries. Katharina Konradi is best known to the Hamburg audience from the local State Opera, where you could already have experienced her as an ensemble member in numerous leading roles. Catriona Morison’s award-winning mezzo-soprano impresses with its »warm-earthy timbre and excellent clarity«, as the FAZ wrote about one of her song recitals. The political and military conflicts between Germany and France in the 19th century did not stop even when it came to art – many French composers wanted to audibly break away from their neighbours. However, this does not mean that people had closed their ears to sounds beyond the border. France’s most important song composer, Gabriel Fauré, loved the classical song form just as much as Brahms. Ernest Chausson gravitated more to Richard Wagner’s free recitative. As repertoire gems, the singer duo have brought along songs by a sister duo: the opera diva Maria Malibran died at just 28 years old and, in addition to umpteen thousands of fans, also left behind a handful of songs. Her sister Pauline Viardot-García, conversely, became very old – and is one of France’s composers absolutely worth rediscovering!

Camilla Nylund / Helmut Deutsch / Song Recital

Camilla Nylund’s dramatic soprano has all it takes for the grand operas by Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. But the Finn, who was recently hailed at the Elbphilharmonie for her »American Songbook« project, can also sing a couple of smaller numbers. This is particularly exciting when, with Helmut Deutsch, one of the most sought-after accompanists of all is at the piano. Alban Berg’s »Sieben frühe Lieder« (Seven Early Songs) are real gems and sound romantic in their own particular way – and tremendously sensitive. You can hear a lot of Gustav Mahler here! Especially as a composition pupil of Arnold Schönberg, the very young composer also makes forays to the limits of tonality here, however. Once older, he stubbornly held back many of his songs, but chose to release these seven. Obviously, he was particularly fond of them. With their warm, scintillating tenderness, which intensifies to a frenzy, they open up completely new horizons. There is perhaps no help for anyone who does not get goosebumps when the roses burst open in Theodor Storm’s »Nachtigall« (Nightingale)…