Masterclass Christoph Prégardien
The German tenor Christoph Prégardien has a big reputation in the domain of the ultimate in vocal chamber music: the romantic lied. The romantic lied rose to popularity in Vienna around 1800 thanks to Franz Schubert who was a past master at capturing the tangible emotional charge of a text in a melody and piano accompaniment that perfectly conveyed the atmosphere.
A whole catalogue of composers from Schumann to Richard Strauss in Germany and Ravel and Debussy in France produced lieder which would have been totally different but for Schubert’s work. The master class that Prégardien is giving during the Three-Day Music Festival is about the secret of the interpretation of the lied. The biggest secret is to find a way of getting across the timeless, unadorned, honest way in which the text and music communicate things that are utterly timeless.
If a performance of a lied is a success, it’s as if someone is looking you straight in the eye and telling you the absolute truth because the form is so intimate, involving a single singer and pianist. The singer and the pianist are out to become more or less invisible and at the same time to transform themselves into a single, indivisible theatre personality with tremendous presence. Each individual in the audience feels a natural sense of being face to face and touched to the core by the text and music that are sometimes centuries old.
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