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3 Centuries of Vocal Music. Anytime, Anyplace!
Programmes
Over the years SongCircle’s four singers have built up a large repertoire. In addition to their regular programmes, they can vary their repertoire to suit the wishes of the concert presenter.
Mediterrannée
Salon d’Automne
Kipfeljause
Vysoká
Severn and Somme
Buren in Baden Baden
Love and Marriage
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Buren in Baden Baden
SongCircle is celebrating the 200th birthday of Robert Schumann with our new programme, ‘Buren (neighbours) in Baden Baden’.
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Love and Marriage
“Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can't have one without the other”
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Mediterrannée
Songcircle takes you on a romantic musical journey, starting with a moonlit cruise by gondola through the canals of Venice – the very inspiration for so many composers - Schumann, Saint-Saens, Hahn and Fauré. These are their most characteristic songs about the ‘most Serene Queen of the Adriatic’.
In Rossini’s portrayal of the Venetian Carnaval we see the other, more raucous side of the city’s charm.
On to Tuscany in the music of Julius Röntgen. This contemporary of Brahms, having seen the composer conduct (and accompany) his Liebesliederwaltzer in Vienna, was moved to compose vocal chamber music of his own along the same lines. He set his Toscanische Rispetti to Italian serenades and odes, translated into German.
Schumann’s Spanisches Liederspiel are inspired by picturesque Spanish poems, translated into German by Emanuel Geibel. In a letter Schumann writes: The Liederspiel has, I believe, a rather original form – in its entirety it produces a most cheerful impression, I think. These will perhaps enjoy the broadest popularity of any of my songs. And this is all due to the cheery, stimulating poems.
While in Spain we pay a visit to Don Quixote, in two of Jaques Ibert’s songs composed for the film Don Quixote, directed by G.W. Pabst in 1933.
Mezzo soprano Pauline Viardot’s famous salon was attended by the likes of Saint-Saëns, Clara Schumann, Franz Lizst, Berlioz and Alfred de Musset. Her song Les Filles de Cadix portrays the taunting flirtation of young Spanish girls – Viardot herself was Spanish (her sister was celebrated singer Maria Malibran).
Salon d’Automne
Starting in 1903 paintings were shown each year in Paris at exhibitions organised by the Sociéte du Salon d’Automne, a reaction to the more conservative Paris Salon. At these exhibitions new styles of painting were presented and music by composers such as Debussy and Satie was performed. The musical and literary salons determined the cultural life of 19th century Europe just as much as the formal settings of the concert hall and Academy. Held in the homes of the great and good, or important well-to-do artists of the day, this tradition defined the artistic taste of the age. New musical works were heard for the first time at such salons. They also served as a place to debate new ideas in politics and literature.
SongCircle honours this tradition with compositions of Brahms, Wolf, Satie, Gustav Jenner, Puccini, Massenet, Vaughan Williams and C.V. Stanford.
Kipfeljause
After the success of A German Requiem (1869) in Leipzig, Brahms began to turn his gaze more towards Vienna, rather than his native Hamburg. During carefree walks in the Prater, he left the chaste melancholy of the Requiem behind and completed the Liebesliederwalzer opus 52 (1869). This vocal dance music has stronger links to the Ländler - country dances - of Franz Schubert than to the sophisticated Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss. The Liebesliederwalzer, swiftly composed and published, and combining the new waltz cadence with light and flirtatious love poems, are considered the most attractive of Brahms’ lighter works.
The first version of Brahms’ opus 103 Zigeunerlieder für vier Singstimmen (Sopran, Alt, Tenor und Baß) mit Begleitung des Pianoforte appeared in 1888. The eleven quartets were based on texts from a collection of Hungarian folksongs with piano accompaniments composed by Zoltán Nagy and collected and translated into German by Hugo Conrat. The new settings by Brahms were premiered during a coffee salon, or ‘Kipfeljause’, organised by friends of Brahms, and with the composer and Ignaz Brüll at the piano. These pieces met with such success, that Brahms felt obliged to make solo versions of eight of the eleven quartets
Vysoká
Nature and Czech folk music were for Antonin Dvořak constant sources of musical inspiration. Early on in his career, while earning his living giving piano lessons, he wrote two collections of duets set to Moravian texts: his opus 20 and 29. Dvořak’s walking companion Janaček made four-voice settings six of the duets, and gave them the title Sechs Klänge aus Mähren. In 1884 Dvořak had a house built in the little village of Vysoká. The by now well-known composer wrote much of his best-loved music there, as always influenced by the beauties of nature. Janaček Tchaikovsky and Brahms, who supported Dvořak in his career and followed his musical development, form an essential contrast to Dvořak’s music in this programme.
Severn and Somme
The charming Severn river, flowing towards Gloucester from the Cambrian Mountains, was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for English poets, painters and composers in the early years of the 19th century. Their idyllic artistic life was cruelly brought to an end as, after years of mounting tension, the First World War broke out in 1914.In the four years of this catastrophic war, Europe would be ravaged, and millions would lose their lives. At the battle of the Somme alone, 400.000 British troops died.
This had a devastating effect upon musical life in Great Britain. Many composers and poets fought at the front (Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Gurney and Graves) or were affected in other ways (Quilter and Holst).
The story of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937), was one of the most tragic among the English war poets and composers. Born in Gloucester, the Severn valley was to him a life-long source of inspiration and comfort. In 1916 he travelled to France and fought at the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele, where he was injured in a gas attack. Gurney published his collection Severn and Somme (1917) while he was still serving as a soldier during the war. His psychological condition deteriorated after the war, and he spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental institutions.
The war severely disrupted musical life in France as well. Although not as many poets or composers actually fought at the front, the pre-war tensions, the war itself and the scars it left determined the course of their artistic life (Hahn, Saint-Saëns, Roussel, Satie, Poulenc and Apollinaire).
In Severn and Somme SongCircle presents a programme exploring this, one of the most dramatic periods in our musical history. Starting with the Fin du Siècle period, and taking us through the time of the Great War, the interbellum years and to the very threshold of the Second World War.
Buren in Baden Baden
SongCircle is celebrating the 200th birthday of Robert Schumann with our new programme, ‘Buren (neighbours) in Baden Baden’. We look at Schumann’s intense and fascinating relationship with Clara Wieck.
I taught you to kiss – then you held me and taught me the meaning of faithfulness. Two benevolent spirits watch over us: those of Art, and of Love. (RS to Clara, Leipzig, 18 April, 1838)
In 1838 the singer and composer Pauline Viardot entered the lives of Robert and Clara. After seeing her perform, Robert, who was subject to fits of depression, wrote:
My heart was like stone, when suddenly I became so moved that the tears flowed like a river.
Viardot in turn had ties to Frederick Chopin, with whom she regularly played piano quatre-mains. Professionally she and her whole family were celebrated for the roles they sang in the operas of Rossini.
‘Buren in Baden Baden’ features works by Robert and Clara Schumann, Pauline Viardot and Gioacchino Rossini.
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