Caroline Rellstab News
opera singer, singer
- soprano
Last update
2024-04-25
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2022-12-02 17:11:00
[…] that then sets out along new paths were equally apparent, inspiring and comforting in similar measure. The almost Lisztian sensibility of Dass sie hier gewesen offered nice contrast, the set’s culmination in a declamatory, richly expressive Greisengesang calling Fischer-Dieskau to mind. No more than anywhere else, though, did one size fit all, a silvery, surprisingly tenor-like reading of Du bist die Ruhfinely complemented by Huber’s voicing of harmony and counterpoint. Seven Schwanengesang settings of Ludwig Rellstab took us to the interval. The ‘Bächlein’ of ‘Liebesbotschaft’ set the scene and underlay it, in figurative as well as locational terms. A deeply touching ‘Kriegers Ahnung’ took in several moods, not least the proto-Wagnerian; likewise the later ‘In der Ferne’, its world-weariness prefiguring Wagner’s Dutchman, the final stanza deeply—in more than one sense—ambiguous, whispering breezes performing their magic whichever way they or fate chose. Gerhaher’s ardent ‘Ständchen’ really felt like a serenade, in […]
2021-10-20 08:37:41
Birdsong on the River: Ailish Tynan, Ian Wilson and James Gilchrist at the Oxford Lieder Festival
[…] with a new tenor at the last possible moment. And nothing in James Gilchrist's performance suggested anything but practised ease. We began with a group of Ivor Gurney songs, which cycled through the seasons but also paralleled the journey from birth to death. Then came a Nocturne for horn and piano by Franz Strauss (Richard's horn-player father), then a group of Schubert songs which also moved through the seasons, and finally Auf dem Strom, Schubert's Rellstab setting which was written for his only major public concert, on 26 March 1828, the first anniversary of Beethoven's death. In Ivor Gurney's Down by the Salley Gardens (which eschews the traditional tune completely), Gilchrist's performance combined lyric beauty with a sense of him confiding in you something highly personal. Throughout the recital, I was struck by Gilchrist's remarkable ability to combine superb clarity of diction with a profoundly beautiful sense of line. It […]
2021-03-26 15:01:47
The name “Moonlight Sonata” was given to this music by the German music critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab five years after Beethoven’s death. This sonata consists of three movemens: Adagio sostenuto, allegretto and presto agitato. It is significant that the layout of this work does not follow the traditional movement arrangement of fast–slow–fast. Instead, the first movement is played very quietly, and the loudest it gets is mezzo forte. The adagio sostenuto makes the most powerful impression on many listeners. The second movement becomes somewhat faster and it is a bridge to the next movement. It plays a role of
2020-12-08 09:54:45
Immersive and intense: Schubert's Swan Song from Roderick Williams and friends at Spotlight Chamber Concerts
[…] to be immersive and dramatic, which it was. That there were no printed programmes was, of course, something of a bonus, we were able to follow the words on our phones so that to the singers the audience must have looked like assembled shadows with just spots of light. Schwanengesang was Schubert's publisher's title, something catchy to capitalise on the composer's death. The cycle (or collection) consists of settings of seven poems by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) and six settings of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) which Schubert was working on just before he died. Schubert had already tried, and failed to get the Heine settings published and there exists a fine copy of the thirteen in Schubert's hand which suggests he was thinking of trying to market them like that. But here we run against our lack of knowledge, did he think of it as a cycle or was he simply […]
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