Sunday, 11 September 2016
Kazina Hall, Slovene National Theatre Maribor at 7.30 pm
Maribor

Josef Wagner, bass-baritone
Christian Schmidt, piano

Programme
Franz Schubert: Schwanengesang, D 957
***
Richard Strauss: Selection of early lieder
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel

Austrian bass-baritone Josef Wagner, who sharpened his vocal mastery on both opera stages and through collaborations with some of the leading musicians of the concert stage, invites us on a journey to worlds of Romanic Lieder both near and distant, together with pianist Christian Schmidt — already familiar to local audiences. The evening will open with Schubert’s final collection of songs, Schwanengesang, in which the composer opens his intense inner experiences to the world one last time in poetry set to music. The concert concludes with a British connection to the Schubertian tradition and the Austrian composer’s influential collection Winterreise. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s cycle Songs of Travel depicts the feeling of travelling through spaces both familiar and foreign, a journey in which the English composer draws parallels with experiencing the outside world by investigating the human interior in his completely individual style.

In between, however, is a trip into something literally child-like. The two artists will peek into the early years of composer Richard Strauss, who in his later works proliferated as another important link in the line of the greatest masters of the Lied. We will listen to a selection of his earlier songs with great interest.

In collaboration with musikabendeGRAZ.