Tenor Benjamin Butterfield and pianist Sarah Hagen will open their concert at the Matsqui Centennial Auditorium on Friday, November 20, with Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 24.
Adding the opus number to the title helps to distinguish this Liederkreis (Song Cycle) from his other one which was catalogued as Op. 39. We heard that one a few years ago when tenor Isaiah Bell featured it in a program that he curated and performed.
Schumann wrote this series of nine songs in 1840, his Year of Song. He composed more than half his lifetime production of songs—almost 140 of them—in this one miraculous year, the year of his marriage to Clara Wieck. He based them on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, whose Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs) became one of the most popular books of German verse ever published.
Written at the height of the Romantic Era, these songs are imbued with all the emotional intensity so typical of that period and its art. They sing of love with longing and delight, with disappointment, and with bitterness at unrequited love. They sing of death, sometimes with dread, sometimes with resignation, and sometimes even as an escape from sorrows.
Sarah Hagen will help to portray these turbulent emotions through the tapestry of Schumann’s brilliant piano accompaniment. She will close the first half of the concert with three short piano works by the great French composer Cécile Chaminade.
In keeping with the theme of song cycles, Butterfield and Hagen have curated two cycles for the second half of the concert, songs by Benjamin Britten and Randy Newman. The program displays two talented musicians at their creative best.
Tickets are available online at www.valleyconcertsociety.com at $35 for adults and $20 for students. For more information, call 604-289-3377.
John Wiebe
President
The Valley Concert Society