»Fascinatingly unconventional« – that is how Rondo Magazine describes the album »Echo«, on which baritone Georg Nigl and pianist Olga Pashchenko can be heard, demonstrating their combined artistic vision and »total musical harmony«. This dream team is now performing in the Elbphilharmonie Recital Hall with a work as beautiful as it is profound: Franz Schubert’s »Schwanengesang« (Swan Song).
Schubert was working on this song collection until shortly before his death and, with »Ständchen« (Serenade), created perhaps his most famous song. Alongside such tender declarations of love, the collection also contains dark emotional landscapes of striking radicalism, including his setting of Heine’s »Der Doppelgänger«, a work whose intensity almost pushes the art song beyond its limits.
The wide range of moods and musical textures demonstrates that Schubert, even at the end of his life, remained committed to searching for ever new forms of expression. Nigl and Pashchenko complement the 14 songs of »Schwanengesang« with further selected works by Schubert, inviting both themselves and the Hamburg audience to spend an entire evening wandering through the composer’s beautiful abysses.
PERFORMERS
Georg Nigl baritone
Olga Pashchenko piano
PROGRAM
Franz Schubert
Schwanengesang, D 957
and other lieder by Franz Schubert
