ConcertPulse
Günther Groissböck / Malcolm Martineau
Elbphilharmonie, Kleiner Saal (Hamburg)
Günther Groissböck’s career has taken him to the world’s great opera houses, from Vienna through New York to Bayreuth. The Austrian bass is at the top of his game, but it’s not only with Wagner, Strauss et al. that he delights audiences with his jet-black voice. He also makes regular appearances as a sensitive and versatile lieder singer, and comes to Hamburg now with a particularly moving programme. Contemporaries of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky must have felt that his music had been beamed down from a distant star. The »Songs and Dances of Death«, written in 1875, are bold and new, gripping music full of experiment, in which Mussorgsky has Death assume different roles and even appear in person. Transience is also a central theme in the works of Gustav Mahler, who returned repeatedly to the collection of folk poems »Des Knaben Wunderhorn« for texts to base his songs on. His setting of »Urlicht« is particularly well-known: it later appeared in an orchestral version in Mahler’s Second Symphony, and achieved great popularity in that form.