Below are various programmes: solo-piano, songrecitals with Barbara Hannigan and the cycle: "Im wonderschönen Monat Mai" with actress Barbara Sukowa. Please scroll down to find the programme you want.

  PIANO RECITAL REINBERT DE LEEUW: SATIE !

  PIANO RECITAL REINBERT DE LEEUW: LISZT !

Franz Liszt  1811-1886	Lugubre Gondola I & II
Franz Liszt	Historische Hongaarse Portretten (1885)
	István Széhenyi
	Ferenc Deák
	László Teleki
	József Eötvös
	Mihály Vörösmarty
	Sándor Petöfi
	Mihály Mosonyi
	======== pauze
Franz Liszt	Via Crucis (1876)
	Vexilla Regis
	Station I	~ Jésus est condamné à mort
	Station II	~ Jésus est chargé de sa croix
	Station III	~ Jésus tombe pour la première fois
	Station IV	~ Jésus rencontre sa très sainte mère
	Station V	~ Simon le Cyrénéen aide Jésus à porter sa croix
	Station VI	~ Sancta Véronica
	Station VII	~ Jésus tombe pour la seconde fois
	Station VIII	~ Les femmes de Jérusalem
	Station IX	~ Jésus tombe pour la troisième fois
	Station X	~ Jésus est dépouillé de ses vêtements
	Station XI	~ Jésus est attaché à sa croix
	Station XII	~ Jésus meurt sur la croix
	Station XIII	~ Jésus est déposé de la croix
	Station XIV	~ Jésus est mis dans le sépulcre

Lees ook: "De mooiste noot...."

   PROGRAMME REINBERT DE LEEUW, SCHÖNBERG ENSEMBLE AND BARBARA SUKOWA

Below are two lieder programmes of Barbara Hannigan (soprano) and Reinbert de Leeuw; the German programme with composers as Schönberg, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Berg, Webern and Wolf and the French programme with composers such as Duparc, Charpentier and Chausson.

 PROGRAMME BARBARA HANNIGAN, soprano / REINBERT DE LEEUW, piano
 

 FRENCH PROGRAMME BARBARA HANNIGAN, soprano / REINBERT DE LEEUW, piano

   IM WUNDERSCHÖNEN MONAT MAI

Reinbert de Leeuw 'hercomponeerde' speciaal voor filmactrice Barbara Sukowa liederen van Schubert en Schumann in zijn nieuwe cyclus "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" waarin Sukowa's stem zich beweegt tussen parlando en Schönbergs Sprechgesang.

Dirigent Reinbert de Leeuw vindt dat de betekenis van teksten in liedrecitals volkomen op de achtergrond is geraaktin de huidige concertpraktijk, die meer aandacht lijkt te schenken aan de uitvoerende stem en wil met actrice Barbara Sukowa de dramatische, theatrale kracht van de liederen terugwinnen.

http://reload1.vpro.nl/programma/dewandelendetak/afleveringen/20034227/

Reinbert de Leeuw re-composed especially for the film actress Barbara Sukowa, songs by Schubert and Schumann in his new cycle “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” . Her voice moves back and forth between parlando and Schönberg’s Sprechgesang. 

Conductor Reinbert de Leeuw feels that the meaning of the texts in song recitals as they are performed nowadays, have become less important than the highly skilled art of singing and together with actress Barbara Sukowa, he reclaims de dramatic, theatrical power of the song texts.

http://reload1.vpro.nl/programma/dewandelendetak/afleveringen/20034227/

 

“Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai” is performed by the Schönberg Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw and actress Barbara Sukowa

Reinbert de Leeuw

Dreimal sieben Lieder nach Schumann und Schubert

In 1984 the Schonberg Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw first performed Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the actress Barbara Sukow, and it created a sensation. Out of the long-term collaboration between conductor and soloist came a mutual desire to mount a similar production around one of their special loves – German Romantic Song, in particular that of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann.

Composed in 1912 for an actress, Pierrot Lunaire has a close affinity with the music-theatre genre that was prevalent in Germany at the time: expressive and highly charged, as much acting as singing, and certainly not fo the highly trained vocal chords by concert hall Lieder.  Schönberg’s piece of ‘three times seven poems by Albert Giraud’ is, in that respect, more at home on the stage than on the oncert platform.

Now De Leeuw has created a similarly structures pendant to this cycle, entitled Im wunderschönen Monat Mai or three times seven songs after Schubert and Schumann. It is his own arrangement of well-known song for voice and piano, which he has made into amusic-theatre piece for ensemble and female voicethat veers between parlando-like singing to Schönberg’s

‘Sprechgesang’; a drastic reworking that transforms the lyrical into the dramatic, and embraces the choice and performing order (in collaboration with the singer), instrumentation, cuts, links and other transformative interventions, but above all brings with it the structure and dramatization of a romantic story in words and music. The binding narrative thrust is provided by Schumann’s Dichterliebe (1840), itself a choice or ‘suite’ of poems by Heinrich Heine and the archetypal romantic song-cycle, which begins with a May song of tender love, speaks of hope and desire, of torment and doubt, and ends with the image of limitlessly vast coffin I  which the ‘alten, bösen Lieder’ (bad old songs) along with all the poet’s love and pain, are committed to the bottomless grave of the sea.  A journey through love and life, encompassing every possible emotion. ‘Dichterliebe hateignes Ungluck stets betroffen’ (A poet’s love is only a reflection of his own unhappiness), wrote the poet Friedrich Rückert, and Schumann seized upon the title of his cycle.

The Romantics have a penchant for grand emotions.They talk of ‘rstlesslove’, ‘burning hot’bosom, of ‘dying in an embrace, the working of ‘fate’, a ‘holy sentiment’.In disappointment the heart is immediately ‘deeply wounded’ or ‘torn apart’, the ‘rejected one’, the ‘wretched and the sick’ and pitiful’, bursts out in ‘flood of tears’. With such violent emotions, too great for mere mortals, death is never far from the surface – sometimes as a metaphir. Often as a deliverance from abondonment: ‘Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein’( “In darness I will find solace’). At every turn the Romantics lean towards ‘Nachtseite’( the dark side), the morbid, the disturbing, the fantastical, as personified by the ashen ‘Doppelgänger’- towards the ‘Unheimliche’, as Freud called his study of this period.

In the song texts, the emotions are kept in check through the use of verse form, metre and rhythm, but also by social constraints that often force the poet to be implicit and innocent. Goethe’s ‘Heideröslein’ appears to depict and idyllic landscape with a boy and a rose, until one questions the meaning of all that ‘breaking’and ‘stabbing’. And the music is often more more understated than the passions evoked: something that is marked ‘wild and passionate’can dound extremely civilized, serene even: the charge is greater than the discharge. For tentieth-century ears, more accustomed to harsher words and harsher sounds, De Leeuw has given the songs of Schumann and Schubert a sharper focus, made them more succint, direct, earthy, pusing both composers beyond their boudaries, as it were. 

Gemtle passages and repetitions are sometimes omitted, the bizarre, extreme and obsessive are emphasized, stillness is even stiller, fff ( in chamber music!) is an overwhelming fortissimo. Where the ‘I’ of the text so passionately wants to ‘küssen’(kiss), so fervetly wants to go ‘dahin’ (there), those words stick in the singer’s throat: at other times the melody has awing to it that is at once modern and appropriate.  In the Romantic sirit snatches of other works make brief appearances like echoes of ‘Nebelbilder’( chimera), images in poetry, dreams or (musical) reminiscences. As in a dream, figures both enigmatic and utterly normal weave in and out, the Erlkömig, or a fragment from Schubert’s irony- usually self-deprecatory- is gratefully seized upon. In a nutshell, the expressive imagination Is sent spinning in all directions.

This is not an adaptionimposed on the material from the outside, buth rather a recomposition from within, from the work’s core, in every sense inspired and led by the music itself, its potential and temperament. The genius of those ‘musical poets’ Schumann and Schubert, turned in on itself, boldly set free of artistic rules and the veneer of social acceptability, can emerge fresh and unconventionally new-minted: the heightened artistic sensibility  which – whether in the white heat of passion or in the depth of despair -  is always a fount of beauty, of ‘Holde Kunst’.

Text: Jacques Kruithof – Schönberg Ensemble Edition ‘A century of music in perspective’