Fans of art song recitals know that the lieder landscape is littered with emotional wrecks, with tortured night journeys and the occasional bout of suicidal despair. And what of the composers of these beautiful songs? Many of them were struggling with their own psychological issues, as well.
New York Festival of Song will explore these psychological issues during "Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud's Vienna," a program of songs by composers who were Sigmund Freud's contemporaries: Mahler, Wolf, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Alexander von Zemlinsky. This song recital will present the psychological and musical complexity of fin de siècle art song, in the context of the novel ideas about the human psyche that were circulating in Vienna at that time.
Soprano Janai Brugger and baritone John Brancy will interpret these complex, opulent songs, along with Steven Blier and Michael Barrett on piano, at the Kaufman Music Center in New York on November 11. A special preview performance will be held in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on November 9.
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