Angelika-Kauffmann-Saal

Schubertiade, Schwarzenberg, Austria

7 September 2009

Ian Bostridge, tenor
Julius Drake, piano

Henry Purcell: (arranged by Michael Tippett)
Music for a while

Johann Sebastian Bach: (arranged by Benjamin Britten)
Five sacred songs
* Gedenke doch, mein Geist, zurücke
* Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag
* Liebster Herr Jesu
* Komm, süsser Tod
* Bist du bei mir

Joseph Haydn:
English Canzonets
* Content
* Sailor’s song
* She never told her love
* The wanderer
* Fidelity

Interval

Henry Purcell: (arranged by Benjamin Britten)
In vain, Lesbia, do you beseech me

Benjamin Britten:
* Nightmare
* Slaughter
* Who are these children?
* The children

Kurt Weill: (poems of Walt Whitman)

* Beat! beat! drums!
* Oh captain! my captain!
* Come up from the fields, father
* Dirge for two veterans

Encores

Kurt Weill: Ballade vom angenehmen Leben (Song of Mackie Messer in Dreigroschenoper)
Henry Purcell: Music for a while

Radio Broadcast on Ö1 (Austrian broadcast station)  Thursday 10.9.2009 7:30 pm

Soundbites

Fritz Jurmann, Vorarlberger Neue Zeitung, 7.9.2009

Translated by Petra Habeth

A fantastic finish
An Event in chamber music and song for the finale  of the Schubertiade

(about a chamber music performance) ….
Then, in the evening, the tenor Bostridge, who commutes with virtuosity between extreme worlds, as at home with Purcell as in Weill, who flawlessly recites massive blocks of text by heart, and gets himself worked up expressively to the point of exhaustion about his program. An eventful song recital in which the wonderfully equal performer Julius Drake at the piano played a most crucial part.

Phenomenal

Bostridge has long since developed a unique characteristic for recital. Thanks to a phenomenal vocal technique, he can concentrate fully on the expression, which manifests itself strongly physically. His urge to move, which disturbed us in the fantastically simply sung Bach’s chorales, becomes a stylistic device in the English Canzonets by Haydn, when he mimes a drunk.

He moves forward in familiar ways in the second part, letting loose with his bold imagination a celebration of his nearly boundless vocal possibilities. He provides domestic UK connections between Purcell’s baroque severity and Britten’s harmonic extended song form and brings an oppressive English intensity to anti-war songs by Kurt Weill.