Classical Soundcloud 24

presented by Sparkasse Oberösterreich und LINZ AG

Like the New Year's Concert, the programme of the first of two song recitals at the International Bruckner Festival Linz 2024 draws attention to the fact that 2024 is by no means just a Bruckner year.

A concert not only to mark the 200th birthday of Anton Bruckner, who loved lieder but only left behind a dozen or so contributions to the genre, but also the 120th anniversary of the death of Antonín Dvořák, who was the first Czech composer to write a significant number of songs, the 160th anniversary of the birth and 75th anniversary of the death of Richard Strauss, of whose 170 or so piano songs an astonishingly large number have found their way into the standard repertoire, the 150th birthday of Arnold Schoenberg, for whom song composition served as an experimental laboratory on his way to overcoming tonality. The 150th birthday of Arnold Schönberg, for whom song composition served as an experimental laboratory on his way to overcoming tonality, as formal coherence could be constituted through the text, as well as the 150th birthday and 70th anniversary of the death of Charles Ives, whose more than "150 songs represent perhaps the most significant contribution of American music to musical modernism ever" and whose work as a whole has significantly changed, but above all expanded the popular conception of music, challenging performers and listeners alike to this day.

The well-wishers, two grand masters of their craft, are star baritone Thomas Hampson and his long-time piano accompanist Wolfram Rieger. The two have performed hundreds of recitals together, but never before have they appeared as a duo at the Brucknerhaus Linz. Now the local audience will finally have the pleasure of hearing these exceptional artists perform what Thomas Hampson recently stated in an interview: "Song is a testimony and diary of human existence".