Pioneers' Recital: Alessandro Fisher & Sholto Kynoch

This special recital is exclusively available to our Pioneer Passholders, without whose backing this year's Festival would not be possible. Find out more about the Pioneer Pass here.

In a special programme exclusively for Pioneer Pass holders, the tenor Alessandro Fisher joins Oxford Lieder’s Artistic Director – pianist Sholto Kynoch – for a feast of song from the ornate Italian Baroque to the pinnacle of Romantic German song and poetry, finishing in the Bay of Naples and a more heart-on-sleeve romanticism.

Alessandro was a winner of the Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform in 2013 and the Kathleen Ferrier Awards in 2016 and is now a BBC New Generation Artist. His ‘Italian Songbook’ recital at the 2018 Lieder Festival demonstrated his affinity with a wide range of Italian repertoire, and for this concert he begins by transporting us to the Baroque splendour of Venice, with music by Monteverdi and his contemporaries Legrenzi, Lotti and Vivaldi.

After this, we hear Schumann’s 1840 settings of Heinrich Heine, Dichterliebe (‘Poet’s Love’). Written in Schumann’s annus mirabilis of song writing, this cycle has long been one of the great favourites of the repertoire, from its famous opening line, ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’ (‘In the wondrous month of May’), through the bliss of love and bitterness of rejection, to the final laying to rest of both joy and sorrow.

Alessandro concludes this concert with a selection of 19th- and early 20th-century Neapolitan songs. The pop songs of their time, they are by turn evocative, touching, mischievous and amusing.

This concert will be streamed completely live from the Holywell Music Room.Shortly afterwards, it will also be available to watch again (using the same pass and link) until 1 November 2020. Click here for further information on how tickets will work this year.