Festival of Young Voices Part 3

A Celebration of Romantic Songs and Piano Music by Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss and Amy Beach opened the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2015 Songs of Apollo season as Programme I, continuing the Festival of Young Voices. The performers were the tenor Timothy Fallon and the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, winners of the 2013 Wigmore Hall / Kohn Foundation International Song Competition, in their first UK appearance as a duo since the competition and before they took part in the Israel Schubertiade in Jerusalem. Supported by The Kohn Foundation, the concert took place on Sunday 11 January 2015 at 5.00 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform. A talk-back session with the artists followed at The Muses on the Monday morning.

Performers

• Timothy Fallon – tenor. From Binghamton, New York, he won first prize at the 2013 Wigmore Hall / Kohn Foundation International Song Competition. For six seasons he was house lyric tenor at the Leipzig Opera (Rossini, Mozart), sang Baroncelli in Wagner’s Rienzi under Christian Thielemann at the Bayreuth Festival, and in 2014 received the Franz-Völker Prize for tenors in Mainz. He trained at Westminster Choir College, Binghamton University and the Juilliard Opera Center.
• Ammiel Bushakevitz – piano. Born in Jerusalem and raised in South Africa, he studied in Leipzig and at the Paris Conservatoire and was one of the last private students of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose master classes he accompanied in Berlin and at the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade. A prize-winner at the 2013 Wigmore Hall / Kohn Foundation competition, he had appeared at the Bayreuth, Salzburg and Aix-en-Provence festivals.

Programme

Franz Schubert

• Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams), D 827 – Matthäus von Collin
• Die Sternennächte (The Starry Nights), D 670 – Johann Mayrhofer
• Liebesrausch (Love’s Exhilaration), D 179 – Theodor Körner
• Rastlose Liebe (Restless Love), D 138 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Drei Klavierstücke, D 946 (piano): I. Allegro assai – II. Allegretto – III. Allegro
• Wiegenlied (Lullaby), D 867 – Johann Gabriel Seidl
• Nachtstück (Nocturne), D 672 – Mayrhofer
• Willkommen und Abschied (Welcome and Parting), D 767 – Goethe

Interval

Richard Strauss

• Heimliche Aufforderung (Secret Invitation) – John Henry Mackay
• Sehnsucht (Longing) – Detlev von Liliencron
• Breit’ über mein Haupt dein schwarzes Haar (Spread over my head your black hair) – Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack
• Ich liebe dich (I love you) – Liliencron

Franz Schubert, transcribed by Franz Liszt (piano)

• Auf dem Wasser zu singen
• Erlkönig

Amy Beach

• Three Browning Songs, Op. 44 – Robert Browning: I Send My Heart up to Thee; Ah, Love, but a Day!; The Year’s at the Spring

An encore by Fauré closed the evening (see the review).

About the programme

The booklet introduced each composer. Cordula Kempe wrote of Schubert as a composer who won no fame in his lifetime, much of whose output was lost, and who opened up in music the vastness of the universe and the loneliness of the individual within it. Richard Strauss, who reckoned himself “a first-class second-rate composer”, said that of everything he had written he liked the songs best; he wrote almost all of them for the female voice, most for his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna.

Amy Beach (1867–1944), born into a New England family in Henniker, New Hampshire, was a child prodigy who taught herself composition, made her début as a pianist in Boston in 1883 and soon played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her Mass in E flat made her name; her Gaelic Symphony (1896) made her the first American woman to write a symphony; and she became the first president of the Society of American Women Composers. She wrote some 150 songs, the best known among them the Three Browning Songs.

Press

Alex Austin and Martin Snape reviewed the concert in the Stratford Herald (15 January 2015) as “A perfect performance from a duo with the world at their feet”, closing that the encore “produced the loudest ovation we have ever heard at this truly international venue”. The review is among the downloads below.

Credits

• Programme notes by Cordula Kempe
• Supported by The Kohn Foundation; the duo appeared as winners of the Wigmore Hall / Kohn Foundation International Song Competition 2013