Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

MATTHIAS GOERNE, baritone Born in Weimar, Germany, in 1967, Matthias Goerne began his professional voice training in 1985 with Hans-Joachim Beyer in Leipzig, lat- er studying with legendary lieder and operatic performers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. By 1990 he had earned first prizes in the Lindberg Salomon and Hugo Wolf Competitions and second prize in the Robert Schumann Competition. In 1994 Goerne made his debut with Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra per- forming Brahms’s German Requiem , and he also debuted at London’s Wigmore Hall. Goerne’s successes in opera date to a 1992 production of Hans Werner Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg in Cologne, for which he sang the title role, and his Deutsche Oper Berlin debut as Marcello in Puc- cini’s La bohème . Since his Salzburg Festival op- eratic debut as Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1997, Goerne has appeared at London’s Royal Opera House, Madrid’s Teatro Real, Par- is National Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera, among many others. Go- erne’s repertoire includes the Wagnerian roles of Wolfram in Tannhäuser , Amfortas in Parsi- fal , Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde , and, most recently, Wotan in Die Walküre ; Strauss’s Orest in Elektra and Jochanaan in Salome ; and the ti- tle roles of Berg’s Wozzeck , Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle , Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler , and Ari- bert Reimann’s Lear . His broad discography has earned awards from Gramophone , BBC Music Magazine , Diapason , and ICMA, as well as four Grammy nominations. Beyond his 12 Schubert discs for the harmonia mundi label, Goerne has recently created albums devoted to Brahms (with Christoph Eschenbach), Schumann (with Markus Hinterhäuser), Mahler (with the BBC Symphony), and Wagner (with the Swedish Radio Symphony). This season he was in resi- dence with the New York Philharmonic, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Pittsburgh and Houston Symphony Orchestras as a soloist, returned to the Paris Opera stage as Kurwenal, and presented song recitals with Daniil Trifoniv, Leif Ove Andsnes, and Antonio Pappano. First appearing at Ravinia in 2001, Matthias Goerne returns tonight for his eighth season at the festival. DANIIL TRIFONOV, piano Born in Novgorod in 1991, Daniil Trifonov has emerged as one of a bright new generation of pianists. Beginning his musical studies at age 5, Trifonov honed his skills at Moscow’s Gnessin School of Music from 2000 to 2009, when he re- ceived a Guzik Foundation Career Grant and re- located to the United States, where he continued piano studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music under Sergei Babayan. Having also studied com- position, Trifonov premiered a piano concerto in 2014 and has also written solo and chamber mu- sic. During 2010–11 he medaled at three top mu- sic competitions: Warsaw’s Chopin Competition (third prize), Tel Aviv’s Rubinstein Competition (first prize), and Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Compe- tition (first prize), where he was also awarded the Audience Award and the Grand Prize. Trifonov has since performed with such ensembles as the Berlin, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, La Scala, Oslo, London, Royal Stockholm, Mu- nich, Rotterdam, and Israel Philhamonics; Lon- don, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago Sym- phony Orchestras; and Philharmonia, Cleveland, Minnesota, Mariinsky, Philadelphia, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestras. In 2016 he made his Australian debut with the Sydney, Melbourne and West Australian Symphony Orchestras and was honored as Gramophone ’s Artist of the Year and with the Royal Philharmonic Society Instru- mentalist Award. Recent highlights also include a residency with the Staatskapelle Dresden and a Rachmaninoff concerto cycle with Valery Ger- giev. As a chamber musician, Trifonov regularly collaborates with Nicholas Angelich, Renaud and Gautier Capuçon, Yuri Bashmet, Vilde Frang, and the Pavel Haas Quartet, and he has given recitals at Carnegie Hall; the Kennedy Center; London’s Wigmore Hall, Royal Festival Hall, and Barbican Centre; Berlin’s Philharmonie; the Louvre and Paris’s Philharmonie; Leipzig’s Ge- wandhaus; and Zurich’s Tonhalle, among many other venues. He became an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist in 2013 and has recently re- leased a Rachmaninoff-focused album with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the solo disc Tran- scendental , which won an ECHO Klassik award. Tonight Daniil Trifonov makes his first return to Ravinia, where he made his Chicago-area debut in 2012 on the BGH Classics series. out in the form of poetry or music. You will not be able to play the songs yet, because the words would affect you too much, but I beg you regard them and to lay them aside merely as a death offering to the memory of your dear mother.” Brahms never allowed performances of these compelling songs in his presence. The published score was dedicated to artist Max Klinger. Subject matter and the extremely concentrated musical material separate the Four Serious Songs from the vast majority of Brahms’s Lieder. Biog- rapher Karl Geiringer regarded this song cycle as a type of “solo oratorio,” confronting broad human issues over extended musical time. His position was supported by Brahms’s orchestral sketches for the last song. Other authors, no- tably Max Kalbeck and Malcolm MacDonald, believed that Brahms originally composed this final piece after the death of Elisabeth von Her- zogenberg in 1892. Its musical language and message of hope contrast the more concentrated pessimism of the first three songs. Brahms’s Janus-faced compositional approach was simultaneously retrospective and progres- sive, yet always thoroughly Teutonic. Baroque elements appear in the emphasis on motivic procedures, both melodic and harmonic. Denn es gehet dem Menschen begins with a gloomy folk-like tune in D minor (prescient of Mahler’s Wunderhorn style), but the melody displays almost Bachian chromatic motion in the sub- sequent phrase invoking mankind’s mortality. Brahms hastened the song’s pace at “Es fahrt alles an einen Ort” and introduced for the first time a descending sequence of melodic thirds. This gesture again opens Ich wandte mich und sahe , which begins in G minor but closes in ma- jor. Brahms extended the third sequence twice over an octave-and-a-half compass with the text: “So I praised the dead who had already died, more than the living who still had life.” O Tod, wie bitter bist du further concentrates the dominance of the third interval, overlapping melodic fragments and harmonic progressions. The initial phrase in E minor closely resembles the opening melody of Brahms’s Fourth Sym- phony. (Transfer the fourth vocal pitch up an octave, and the melodies are identical.) Another shift to major accompanies the text “O death, how well you serve him who is in need.” The animated concluding song, Wenn ich mit Men- schen- und mit Engelszungen redete , stands apart from its companions due to the consistent use of major keys (A-flat, B, and A-flat). Descending third sequences are not completely absent from this song. Twice, they are associated with the word “love.” –Program notes © 2019 Todd E. Sullivan RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 29 – AUGUST 4, 2019 94