Details
Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall
University of York
York
YO10 5DD
England
Programme
Roderick Williams – Italian Songbook
Performers
Roderick Williams – baritone
Rowan Pierce – soprano
Katie Bray – mezzo-soprano
Nicky Spence – baritone
James Newby – baritone
Christopher Glynn – piano
Jeremy Sams – Director
Louise Shephard – Director
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
For his final masterpiece, Hugo Wolf looked south – to Italy – and produced a collection of tiny jewel-like songs that paint a kaleidoscopic portrait of village life. The men and women of his Italian Songbook fall in and out of love, with squabbles and petty jealousies heard alongside serenades and love songs of great beauty. Darker undercurrents also occasionally emerge in a songbook that Wolf filled with humour and charm, sarcasm and tenderness, delight and despair. Like Mozart, Wolf creates characters that are astonishingly precise, vivid and detailed, but also somehow universal. And his tiny scenes of village life paint a bigger picture too: a whole world of human frailty, passion and pain. Roderick Williams heads a hand-picked cast of top British singers in a new staged English version of his Italian Songbook, created by Jeremy Sams and Christopher Glynn.