How did you feel?", asks the maestro Prégardien to Anna Gebhardt, the young woman who, seated at the piano in the Vilabertran canonical, has just interpreted together with Jonas Müller, an even younger baritone, the lied Willkommen und Abschied (Welcome and Farewell ). A Schubert classic on a Goethe poem.
“I have noticed that I had to wait for him, go slower”, he responds, referring to the singer. "Exact". That song is about a young man who takes the horse and speaks euphorically about nature, the mountains and the forest, because it turns out that –later you know– he is in love, he feels like a god..., but he has to leave. How can it be that the piano should wait for someone in that state of euphoria?
It is just one example of the subtle work that the famous tenor Christoph Prégardien has been doing this week with two young piano and voice duos from Munich. People who have finished their studies, but who due to the pandemic – in Germany culture closed for two years – have not projected themselves professionally as expected. "They need action," says the director of the Schubertíada, Víctor Medem.
“These young people already work and do master's degrees, but the University of Munich does not help them. It is a gift for them to work with an artist they have never dealt with, who tells them different things than their teacher and gives them coaching on how to face the career, think about programs, communicate to each audience. It is the step from the classroom to the stage, a professional insertion”.
The Catalan festival has granted them a scholarship with its Lied the Future program (a play on words between the German term for poetic song and the English verb lead, which means to direct), financed by the Banc Sabadell Foundation. There are eight scholarship recipients (the other two duos, with the Catalan voices Elionor Martínez and Mireia Tarragó, start tomorrow with the pianist Wolfram Rieger) at 3,500 euros each.
That includes the course, the mentoring, the media kit... They give a recital at the Schubertíada and receive between 750 and 1,500 euros for each concert they do on the Lied the Future circuit, which includes, for example, the Life Victoria festival, but also the Zeist Lied of the Netherlands or the Instituto Cervantes in Munich. The promising soprano Katja Maderer, 22, has already performed six times in Spain.
“The big difference with other masterclasses is that here we have much more time: we are only two duos and we have four hours a day for three days. And with Prégardien it is a unique opportunity to work in detail”, says Müller. "Working only the eight songs of the concert gives time to dive into the text, something to which Prégardien attaches great importance", agrees Gebhardt.
Most of this club of young people who knew each other from the university were not fans of poetry. Now they love it. "Now I see to what extent it is a reflection of what happens to us," says Maderer. His pianist partner, Amadeus Wiesensee, is grateful for his part that this course is "a safe and very intimate space, preserved even from the public, since they are not open classes." Furthermore, Prégardien, who just yesterday gave an impeccable recital in the canonical, wanted to meet them in the spring, in Cologne: a previous three-day job to squeeze the Catalan opportunity.
“Lied the Future is capturing attention throughout Europe –says the tenor–. We need producers like the Schubertíada to give lied and English, French, etc., a space, because we have extraordinary young people, very open-minded”.
Lied courses were something exotic in Spain when, three decades ago, the Schubertíada launched them through Juventudes Musicales España and led by Rieger, the expert and "great educator", recalls Dr. Roch, founder of the festival . At first they were taught in the Figueres casino, where there was a piano on the first floor; They were also made in Madrid, in Valencia..., and they were moved to Altea due to the high demand in the neighboring autonomous community.
From there they spent a decade at the Victoria de los Ángeles conservatory until the Esmuc welcomed them. It was the pianist Francisco Poyato, whom Rieger took to Germany in his day to study something as unknown to him as the lied, who implanted a master's degree at the Barcelona High School. And there Rieger goes every December, and selects from among the students who will perfect themselves and sing the following summer in Vilabertran.
And if in the past the scholarship holders had a couple of concerts from the Juventudes Musicales network, since the Schubertíada took charge of the courses, everything has been reinforced. Medem has linked them to Vilabertran and has expanded the scholarship, bowling and teaching staff. The baritone Matthias Goerne, who is, along with Rieger, the most faithful artist to the festival, auditioned last year to choose his students and changed the life of the young Catalan baritone Ferran Albrich, who, by the way, performs at the aforementioned Dutch festival .
Goerne, in any case, wanted them to be young locals, because... Can it sound strange that four Bavarian students are on scholarships in Catalonia to do German lied with a German artist?
"It should not surprise. The program is European, it comes into play on a European circuit. This week they have been Bavarians who are going to a contest in the Netherlands or have received masterclasses in London or Stockholm. Why not here? Next week there will be two Catalan grantees and one Cantabrian, and next year there will be at least two Catalans. If we want those here to take advantage of the connections we make on an international scale, we must also have people from abroad, because things don't just work in one direction”, concludes Medem.
