Classical music: You can hear Schubert’s last songs at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival TONIGHT at 7:30

By Jacob Stockinger

The Ear has been informed that seats still remain for tonight’s all-Schubert concert at the popular Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.

Half of the concert will be piano music, including the six Moments Musicaux and a work for piano, four-hands, a genre that Schubert often composed in and performed with friends. Ya-Fei Chuang (below) is the featured piano soloist.

Also on the program is “Swan Song” – sung by tenor Charles Blandy (below top) with pianist Alison D’Amato (below bottom) of the Eastman School of Music and the University of Buffalo.

Here are program notes by the festival’s co-artistic director and prize-winning composer John Harbison about the work:

Schwanengesang is not a planned cycle. Instead it is a collection of Schubert’s last songs, as serious and searching as the two great cycles Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise.

Thematically and musically, the songs have much in common and, taken together, they are unequalled in plumbing the emotional depths of the soul, heart-wrenching and heartwarming.

We can’t be certain whether Schubert (below) ever intended them to be performed as a unity.

When they were published early in 1829, after his death at 31, it was the first publisher, Tobias Haslinger, who named the collection Schwanengesang (Swan Song), presumably to emphasize that these were the last fruits of the composer’s genius.

The sequence consists of settings of seven poems by Rellstab, six by Heine and, as an encore,  Seidl’s “Taubenpost,” quite likely the very last song Schubert ever wrote. (You can hear “Taubenpost,” sung by the famed German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, in the YouTube video at the bottom.)

For more information about the festival, the remaining concerts and tickets, visit www.tokencreekfestival.org

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Posted in Classical music
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