【HKU MUSE House Programme】Of Love and Beloved: Christoph Prégardien & Roger Vignoles

Of Love and Beloved

愛 的 禮 讚

CHRISTOPH PR ÉGAR DI E N &

ROGER VIGNOLES

威 格 諾 斯

12

NOV 3PM 2023 SUN

© BEN EALOVEGA

皮 雷 格 迪 恩

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Christoph Prégardien, tenor Roger Vignoles, piano BEETHOVEN

An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 1.

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SCHUBERT

PROGRAMME

12 NOV 2023 | SUN | 3PM Grand Hall, The University of Hong Kong

Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend Wo die Berge so blau Leichte Segler in den Höhen Diese Wolken in den Höhen Es kehret der Maien, es blühet die Au Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder

Rellstab-Lieder from Schwanengesang , D. 957 1.

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Liebesbotschaft Kriegers Ahnung Frühlingssehnsucht Ständchen Aufenthalt In der Ferne Abschied

- INTERMISSION -

SCHUMANN

Dichterliebe, Op. 48 1. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai 2. Aus meinen Tränen sprießen 3. Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne 4. Wenn ich in deine Augen seh 5. Ich will meine Seele tauchen 6. Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome 7. Ich grolle nicht 8. Und wüßten's die Blumen, die kleinen 9. Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen 10. Hör ich das Liedchen klingen 11. Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen 12. Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen 13. Ich hab im Traum geweinet 14. Allnächtlich im Traume seh ich dich 15. Aus alten Märchen winkt es 16. Die alten, bösen Lieder

Today's concert is recorded by RTHK Radio 4. Broadcast details will be announced later.

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CHRISTOPH PRÉGARDIEN Precise vocal control, clear diction, intelligent musicality, and an ability to get to the heart of everything he sings all ensure Christoph Prégardien's place among the world's foremost lyric tenors. Especially revered as a Lieder singer, he kicks off the 2023/2024 season together with pianist Daniel Heide at the Schubertiada Vilabertran, before appearing at the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg/Hohenems in recitals with Julius Drake as well as with his long-time piano partner Michael Gees. Further concerts take him to Wolfsburg for a special Goethe programme with Julius Drake and Udo Samel, to Hong Kong with Roger Vignoles, to Chapel Hill, USA, with Stefan Litwin, on tour in Japan with Michael Gees, and again to the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg and the Schwetzingen SWR Festival with Hartmut Höll, among others. In addition, he will perform Schubert arrangements with the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, as well as interpret Haydn's Creation in Madrid together with Kent Nagano and the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España.

Christoph Prégardien regularly appears with renowned orchestras the world over. He has worked with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, as well as the Boston and San Francisco Symphonies, alongside conductors such as Barenboim, Metzmacher, and Thielemann. His wide orchestral repertoire includes the great baroque, classical, and Romantic oratorios and passions, as well as works from the 17th and 20th centuries. In opera, his roles have included, among others, Tamino, Almaviva (Il barbiere di Siviglia ), Fenton (Falstaff ), Don Ottavio, Titus, Ulisse, and Idomeneo.

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BIOGRAPHIES

His extensive experience singing the Evangelist roles, together with his close working relationship with conductors such as Nagano, Chailly, Herreweghe, Harnoncourt, Luisi, and Gardiner, have provided the perfect base for his increasing dedication to conducting the works of Bach. Following the success of his conducting debut in 2012 leading Le Concert Lorrain and the Nederlands Kammerkoor, he now regularly conducts renowned ensembles like the Balthasar Neumann Choir, Dresdner Kammerchor, Collegium Vocale Gent, and RIAS Kammerchor. In the spring of 2024, he will take the podium for Bach's St. Matthew Passion with Vespres d'Arnadí and the Cor de Cambra del Palau in Barcelona.

The singer has recorded much of his repertoire on a discography of over 150 albums, which have received awards such as the Orphée d’Or of the Académie du Disque Lyrique, the Edison Award, the Cannes Classical Award, and the Diapason d’Or. For the label Challenge Classics, he has recorded Schubert's Schwanengesang with Andreas Staier and Die schöne Müllerin with Michael Gees, which was selected as Editor's Choice by Gramophone magazine and awarded the MIDEM Record of the Year. Shortly thereafter followed recordings of Hugo Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch with Julia Kleiter, Between Life and Death, Wanderer, and the Grammy-nominated Winterreise disc – all with Michael Gees – as well as Father and Son with his son Julian Prégardien.

His Schubert CD Poetisches Tagebuch with Julius Drake was awarded the German Critics' Award 2016. His most recent releases include one recorded in collaboration with the Warsaw Chopin Institute with pianist Christoph Schnackertz featuring songs by Paderewski, Moniuszko and Duparc, and a new recording of Schubert's Schwanengesang and Schumann's Liederkreis, Op. 39 (with Julius Drake). In the fall of 2023, the Etcetera label will release Bach cantatas recorded with Stephan Schultz and Le Concert Lorrain, featuring Christoph Prégardien as baritone.

Teaching remains an important part of Christoph Prégardien's musical life.

Following many years at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Zurich, he gives masterclasses for young singers worldwide and since 2004 has been a professor at the Academy of Music in Cologne.

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ROGER VIGNOLES Roger Vignoles is one of the most distinguished piano accompanists of our time. In a career spanning five decades he has become recognised throughout the world as a leading exponent of the art of song.

He has appeared at all the world's principal venues and festivals, from the Concertgebouw to Carnegie Hall, and with many of the world's foremost artists, such as Sir Thomas Allen, Barbara Bonney, Christine Brewer, Florian Boesch, Bernarda Fink, Elina Garanca, Susan Graham, Dame Kiri te Kanawa, Angelika Kirchschlager, Dame Felicity Lott, Mark Padmore, Christoph Prégardien, and Sarah Walker.

Vignoles celebrated his 70 th birthday in July 2015 at the Wigmore Hall with a star-studded cast of singers, of which Classical Source summed up his continuing contribution to the world of music as a "wonderful pianist, superb musician and ace accompanist".

His extensive discography includes a long and fruitful association with Hyperion Records, recently crowned by the completion of the Complete Songs of Richard Strauss. Other notable recordings include Reynaldo Hahn with Susan Graham; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak with Bernarda Fink; Schubert, Loewe and Krenek with Florian Boesch; Britten and Finzi with Mark Padmore, Fauré, Wolf, Rachmaninov, Chausson and Koechlin with MarieNicole Lemieux, and a wide range from Schubert to Cabaret Songs with Sarah Walker.

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BIOGRAPHIES

Recent engagements include an all-Tchaikovsky programme with Sofia Fomina at de Singel Antwerp, recitals in London, Toulouse, Marseille, Stuttgart and Quebec with Marie-Nicole Lemieux, with Roderick Williams in Aarhus, with Michael Spyres at Opéra national du Rhin and La Monnaie, with Christoph Prégardien in Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Madrid, with Elena Copons and Marta Fontanals-Simmons at the Fundación Juan March, and several appearances at the Wigmore Hall with Elizabeth Watts, James Gilchrist, Nash Ensemble, Julia Sitkovetsky, Nardus Williams and Johannes Kammler. Vignoles had a residency at the Bogota International Music Festival, as well as masterclasses at Tanglewood Music Center, the Marlboro Music Festival, National University of Singapore, the Cleveland Art Song Festival, and the Aldeburgh Festival.

While continuing his busy playing career, Vignoles is deeply committed to working with and coaching younger singers and pianists. He gives frequent masterclasses and workshops in Europe, Scandinavia and the US, where he is a regular visitor to the Juilliard School, Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Tanglewood Music Center. He is an Honorary fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Prince Consort Professor of Accompaniment at the Royal College of Music.

Originally inspired to pursue a career as a piano accompanist by the playing of Gerald Moore, Vignoles read music at Magdalene College, Cambridge, studied piano and accompaniment at the RCM, and later joined the Royal Opera House as a repetiteur. He completed his training with the renowned Viennese-born pianist and coach Paul Hamburger.

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PROGRAMME NOTES

Lieder Masterclass with Christoph Prégardien & Roger Vignoles 11 NOV 2023 | SAT | 2:30PM Rehearsal Room, Run Run Shaw Tower The celebrated duo shares their insights and coaches two pairs of aspiring HKU student mentees, followed by a demonstration and dialogue with soprano Kenix Tsang and pianist Alexander Wong.

Host: Caleb Woo, instructor of HKU Chamber Singers Student Mentees: Angela Hu Anqi, soprano / Jin Yingxi, piano Ronny Or, tenor / Arthur Lee, piano

Caleb Woo, host

Kenix Tsang, soprano

Alexander Wong, piano

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An die ferne Geliebte , Op. 98 LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827) ALOIS JEITTELES (1794-1858) Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), Op. 98 in 1816 is often considered by musicologists the very first important exemplification of a song cycle by a major composer, which exerted a huge influence on later lieder composers like Schubert and Schumann. It is set in the physician Alois Jeitteles' poem collection, which expresses one's inner feeling of yearning for love. Some believe that the song cycle originated from Beethoven's obsession with an unknown woman, his 'immortal beloved', and that the cycle served as a medium for the lovelorn composer to distance her from his mind. One month after the composition, Beethoven confided to his intimate friend Ferdinand Ries that he had found only one woman whom he should doubtless never possess. On the other hand, some conjecture, through lines such as "Ohne Kunstgepräng, erklungen" (With no display of Art), that Beethoven was then reconceiving the deepest source of human contact through songs stripped of artifice with his longing for love.

Beethoven called the six songs Liederkreis , a circle of songs. That is, unlike Schubert's song cycles which often portray a chronological narrative, Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte was written in a way that the musical theme of the first song reappears in the last. The first song, 'Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend', describes a lovelorn protagonist sitting on the hill, gazing into the blue sky, looking for his beloved. The poet hopes to sing in order to remind his beloved of his inner pain, as he also expresses in the second song, 'Wo die Berge so blau'. There he again evokes the imagery of blue, but this time he associates it with the mountains (he was sitting on the hill in the first song).

The key of the second song, G major, is also, quite literally, 'higher' than the E-flat-major first song. The poet is plunged into an Arcadian fantasy in the third song, 'Leichte Segler in den Höhen', and the music brims with buoyancy with a quickened tempo. The third and fourth songs are connected, without pause, by a high E-flat; both songs portray the 'Höhen'—the heights. The tempo gradually increases as the last line reads: "Fließ zurück dann unverweilt!" (Flows directly back to me!). The poet's imagination of nature reaches its apex in the fifth song, 'Es kehret der Maien, es blühet die Au' (May returns, the meadow blooms). Cast in C major, the song portrays the return of Maytime, when 8

the meadows are in bloom. Yet the poet soon realises that he is even more depressed in this lovely season because he says, "Our love alone. Knows no spring". The music turns into C minor when the line reads: "Tränen sind all ihr Gewinnen" (Tears are its only gain). In the final song, 'Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder' (Accept, then, these songs), the poet asks his beloved to take the songs he sang for her, and to play them on the lute with the sweetest tone. The last line of the song echoes that of the first song, but rather than descending to the tonic, it rises to the highest note (high G) of the entire cycle: "Was ein liebend Herz geweiht!" (By what a loving heart has hallowed!).

Rellstab-Lieder from Schwanengesang, D. 957 FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828) LUDWIG RELLSTAB (1799-1860) Whether Schubert's Schwanengesang is a song cycle or a collection of songs is moot. When Tobias Haslinger published 14 of Schubert's late songs in 1829, the manuscript comprised seven settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, six by Heinrich Heine, and one song on a text by J. G. Seidl. While this has led some scholars to argue that the song should be performed according to their poets, recent evidence has shown that Schubert wishes the settings of Rellstab's and Heine's poems to be performed together (sadly, this view has, in turn, led to the occasional omissions of Seidl's 'Die Taubenpost' (The Pigeon Post) in the performance of Schwanengesang ).

The Rellstab-Lieder begins with 'Liebesbotschaft' (Love's message). At the outset, G major evokes a rustic, almost idyllic, feeling, when the poet asks the rushing brook to be his messenger, to bring his beloved back to him.

The ripping piano accompaniment portrays the flowing stream throughout the song, but the poet's message of love seems to fail to reach the beloved because of their distance, as the wandering tonal spaces (E minor, B major, and so on) might signify. In the end, the dynamically softened rippling accompaniment can only become the poet's whispering dreams of love to his dearest. The rustic G major turns into a pensive, lamenting key of C major in the second song, 'Kriegers Ahnung' (Warrior's foreboding). The music, marked with military-like dotted rhythms, narrates a soldier who dreams of 9

his beloved knowing that he will "rest well and sleep deeply". The third song, 'Frühlingssehnsucht' (Spring longing), brings us from the lament of imminent death to the idyllic nature. The contrast between major and minor is echoed in the statement-question structure of the verses. In the end, the poet asks: "Who at last will still my urgent desire?" To which he answers: "Only you can set free the spring in my heart, only you!" Yet the penultimate E-flat minor chord seems to suggest that the poet's longing for love is hopeless. The melancholy also permeates through the fourth song, 'Ständchen' (Serenade). The piano accompaniment, some suggest, resembles the song of the nightingales, which sing about unhappy love. That the song ends in a D major chord makes the question as to whether the singer's hope is fulfilled an open one. Schubert uses E minor, his key of depression, in the fifth song, 'Aufenthalt' (Resting place), to portray the external thundering torrent and the poet's inner torment.

The sixth song, 'In der Ferne' (Far away), opens with an undulating semitonal wave in B minor. The low register seems to depict the poet's lament to himself without solace. In the final song of the Rellstab-Lieder , 'Abschied' (Farewell), Schubert sets the word 'Ade' (Farewell) in different intervals and registers, imbuing the poet's farewell to his beloved's town with mixed feelings.

Dichterliebe , Op. 48 ROBERT SCHUMANN (1810-1856) HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856) The year 1840, known as the Liederjahr (Year of Song), saw Schumann's extraordinary productivity in songs. The 16 songs in the Dichterliebe cycle are settings of Heinrich Heine's poems in Lyrisches Intermezzo , and were written within 10 days. Schumann wrote to a publisher: "How successful these songs may be in public, I cannot really say. I can say, however, that I have never before written anything with such love as when I was composing this group". This 'love', however, cannot be understood lightly. Critics often refer to the 'love' portrayed in the Dichterliebe as one of ambivalence: it is both a celebration of the love between the composer and Clara, the daughter of his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and a reminder of the many uphill battles they had fought in the previous years.

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Scholars and critics have interpreted the Dichterliebe cycle in multiple ways: some understand it in four groups of four, each narrating a unique story; others consider it to be one unified cycle, in which the first song can only be understood when the last song is heard. But this interpretive unease is already encapsulated in the first song, 'Im wunderschönen Monat Mai' (In the marvellous month of May). The song begins as if it were in the middle of nowhere: the tonality is confusing, wavering between F-sharp minor and A major; it is only when the music arrives at a more definite cadence that can we realise that the prelude piano ritornello may well be a structural upbeat of A major. It is as though Schumann bracketed the entire cycle in the ethereal past tense, in which he narrated a story of the absence of love. The final C-sharp seventh chord serves as an agent of both F-sharp minor and A major, yet presents an event to be resolved. As Schumann himself interpreted the final chord: "The listeners fell silent—the strange organist finished—still one, two tones—now all becomes quiet—the moon fled shyly back—still a dissonant chord and nothing more—oh, our hearts longed for the mild consolation of the resolution; but no tone followed and all was silent. Silently the stranger rose, and silently the four men followed—Gustav said: And what then is our life but a seventh chord, full of doubt and containing only unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied hopes. The foreigner must have no small heart, to be able to close in such a way." The final chord is life, claimed Schumann. Rather than seeking an amicable parting of the ways, he believed, we have to understand that our lives are full of "unfulfilled desires and unsatisfied hopes". That Schumann presented an affective journey of unfulfilled desires in a song cycle, can be heard as an ironic totality.

Programme notes by

Edwin Li BA in Music, HKU PhD in Music Theory, Harvard University

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