A young woman with an immaculate countenance and candid gaze went up on the stage of the Vilabertran canonical yesterday. Erika Baikoff, 29, an American of Russian origin and with a past as a classical dancer, appeared at the opening concert of the Schubertiad like Grace Kelly, straight out of a fairy tale. beautiful.
The squire at the piano, James Baillieu, whose sensitive credentials are well known to the public of the Schubertiad, would offer, together with the soprano, a broad and partly unknown program: from Schubert's lieder to Rachmaninov's romansov. The fusion of poetry and music by great Viennese and Russian masters.
And whoosh! From minute one, intoning Schubert's Atys over Johann Mayrhofer's poem with innocent sensuality, Baikoff displayed an innate ability to captivate the public. By the next lied, the dramatic and disturbing Der Zwerg, a ballad with verses by Johann Mayrhofer in which a dwarf strangles the queen for abandoning her king, Baikoff already brought people to tears. And the festival had only just begun.
The young woman would make known a rarely frequented repertoire, like that of the Viennese critic and professor Joseph Marx (1864-1905), who coined the term atonality in his doctoral thesis. And she would delve into her contemporary Korngold and the Sechs einfache Lieder that she composed at the age of 14, already with "its attractive game between tonality and atonality", as the music critic and popularizer Antoni Colomer writes in the program.
Part of the Barcelona musical world had not wanted to miss the appointment, such as Joaquim Uriach and Joan Oller, president and general director of the Palau de la Música, respectively, or his predecessor in office, Mariona Carulla. Nor does the general director of Inaem, Joan Francesc Marco, attend these liederistic evenings. For their part, the President of the Government and the Minister of Culture delegated to the representative of the Territorial Services - perhaps due to the absence of Catalan artists at this opening evening. And, hey, the new mayor of Vilabertran also came, bringing a lot of people with him. In fact, there was an abounding audience not necessarily faithful to the Schubertiade, an audience that kept sepulchral silence like the most veteran, kidnapped by the magic that the young soprano exuded.
His childish appearance could not be misleading. After beautiful moments of color or lyricism in which the singer managed to be expressive in the “less is more” way, others awaited with a drama more typical of an old soul. If she had to roll up her sleeves, the soprano did not hesitate to drag the audience into the mire of emotions.
"I'm hallucinating," Joan Oller said in the intermission, when the Russian thunder box was still to be uncovered. If the German lieder originates from Germanic literature from the end of the 18th century, in the Russian song the inheritance of the musical prosody of Pushkin or Clinka is collected by composers such as Rimsky-Kórsakov and Tchaikovsky. And Baikoff approached them with the knowledge of someone looking into his own roots. The young woman was transformed. And already in the themes of Rachmaninov the tears rolled again. As he pointed out to La Vanguardia, he had delved into the Russian tradition on his own until he recovered the original of the score that had been lost in the Soviet era.
Víctor Medem, the director of the Schubertíada, that capital invention launched three decades ago by Doctor Roch, discovered it in his day in a singing contest, that of Helmut Deutsch in Vienna. He presented it last year at the Schubertíada in Cantabria and the one in Valdegovía, but since then he has made a spectacular qualitative leap that suggests that he has become part of the family of artists who signed up for the Schubertíada. The pianist Daniel Haide, who accompanies Christoph Prégardien today and Andrè Schuen on the 24th, was cycling around yesterday as part of it. "I have taken the Rieger path," he said. The route from Figueres to Vilabertran that Wolfram Rieger has been doing for years in this very international corner of Catalonia.
