Recital

16 March 2005
Großer Saal, Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main

Simon Keenlyside
Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester
Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

Mahler: Eight Lieder

• Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (I breathed a sweet scent)
• Des Antonius van Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony of Padua’s sermon to the fishes)
• Ich ging mit Lust (I walked with joy)
• Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder (Do not spy on my songs)
• Fruhlingsmorgen (Spring morning)
• Liebst du um Schonheit (If you love for beauty)
• Um Mitternacht (At midnight)
• Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I am lost to the world)

Strauss: An Alpine Symphony

What the critics say

Stefan Schickhaus, Frankfurter Rundschau, 18 March 2005 [excerpt]

Translated by Ursula Turecek

Base camp in impressive height
…’For once I wanted to compose how a cow gives milk’ said Richard Strauss once about his nature-sounding Alpensinfonie with cow-bells and thunderstorms. For questions like this actually, the soloist, the British baritone Simon Keenlyside, would have been competent, he is a graduated zoologist after all. Here he sang Mahler songs (partly accompanied in the delicate orchestral version by Luciano Berio) with extreme refinement also in the falsetto register. Similar to his Mahler singing colleague Christian Gerhaher, Keenlyside places emphasis on the instrumentally thought vocal line, therefore not lingering with the single word but thinking in large entities. The specialist periodical NMZ for some time has seen in this baritone from London “one of the few young singers who could play a similarly decisive role in the field of Mahler interpretation as Fischer-Dieskau in the 50es.”