Another year has passed and this week marks the 9th anniversary of Liederabend. I won't say the year has passed very quickly, on the contrary; it coincided exactly with the pandemic year (just one year ago, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was cancelled amid great controversy) and this time has been long, exhausting, sad and confusing. In consequence, Liederabend went through fire and water, like everybody, I guess. I imagine that my posts always reflect my mood, but since this time the mood is collective, who knows, maybe someday we will go through the [...]

In 1774, in a city that probably was Linz, a child named Marianne was born; as the father was unknown, she took the surname of her mother, actress Elisabeth Pingruber. Four years later, the mother married Joseph Georg Jung and, although the man didn't adopt her, the child became also known as Marianne Jung. In 1798, after Herr Jung's death, mother and daughter moved to Frankfurt, where the girl, now a ballet dancer, captivated the audience; her admirers included Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, the mother of our Goethe, and Clemens Brentano, co-author of [...]

It is quite common that the poetic voice in love songs is addressed to a lover who is far away; literally, for example, in Beethoven's cycle An die ferne Geliebte. When lovers need a messenger to convey words and feelings, Romantic poetry gives it the form of an element of nature that covers the distance between them. Sometimes it's a bird or some other flying creature (a bee or a butterfly, for instance); sometimes, clouds; sometimes, a brook, and sometimes, as we will see in this article, the wind.

Songs that leave me unmoved. That I wouldn't add to a list of songs I don't like (a list which, in public, has a single item), but I wouldn't say I like them either. Songs that arouse mixed feelings when included in a recital programme, and I know that the feelings will turn into positive or negative depending on the day. That's to say: it will depend on me, on the artist, on the place it takes during the concert... It's an interesting experiment I do relatively often, because the four or five songs I keep in mind are among the best known of their authors.

Luciano Berio liked traditional music, but he felt some kind of uneasiness when he listened to the usual arrangements for voice and piano made by his colleagues. The reason for this uneasiness was, I would say, that the piano has never been a traditional instrument; folk songs are often unaccompanied and, when accompanied, the instruments are simple, such as flute or guitar. For this reason, in his collection Folk Songs, the voice (not placed voice) is accompanied by an ensemble of seven instrumentalists who play flute or piccolo, clarinet, harp or guitar, cello, viola and percussion. [...]