The Height of Romanticism

Esteemed German soprano Juliane Banse came to the 2023 Festival for a memorable choreographed version of Winterreise. That recital was given a 5-star review in The Guardian, which described her ‘familiar beauty of tone and punctilious focus on the text’ and wrote that the performance was ‘channelled through the texts and Schubert’s response to them, which Banse… projected with such faithfulness and vivid musical intelligence.’ For tonight’s concert, she is joined by the sought-after pianist Daniel Heide for a programme that revels in the rich late-Romantic voices of fin-desiècle Vienna. At the heart of the recital is Mahler’s powerful Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (‘Songs of a Wayfarer’) whose folk-like texts are by the composer himself. The programme also includes Alban Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder (‘Seven early songs’), an extraordinary set of songs that take the Romantic musical language to its limits, before concluding with a group of songs by Richard Strauss that includes ‘September’ from his Four Last Songs.