PERFORMERS
Simon Lobelson, baritone
Jack Symonds, piano
Two national leaders in contemporary music unite in this concert, presented prior to their upcoming commercial CD recording of Mussorgsky, Rihm and Crumb. Jack Symonds and Simon Lobelson have performed together countless times all over the Australia and the world to great acclaim, and here present in recital two of these three planned song cycles for voice and piano.
Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death (1875 – 1877) is a chilling song cycle in which Death emerges not as a monster, but as a seducer, a comforter, and an inevitable companion. Across four songs — Lullaby, Serenade, Trepak, and The Field Marshal — Mussorgsky transforms Death into a macabre storyteller, weaving scenes of haunting beauty and stark realism. His music, raw and vividly human, strips away romantic sentiment to reveal the quiet terror and strange tenderness of mortality. This performance explores the full dramatic range of the cycle — from whispered lullabies to grim triumph — illuminating one of the 19th century’s most unflinching meditations on life’s final dance.
Wolfgang Rihm (1952 - 1924) was one of the leading German composers of recent times and his vast, hugely varied output includes many song cycles. Vermischter Traum dates from 2017 and is a dark, anguished setting of Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius’s meditations on time and death. Uniquely, Rihm chooses a form that sets and re-sets the same text, as if the singer were turning over these weighty thoughts in his mind and coming to different conclusions. In an arch structure of seven songs, the 2nd, 4th and 6th all wonder about time, the 1st and 7th literally ask the question - ‘what is life?’ while the 3rd and 5th are extended death-bed meditations on the failing body.
The musical language is a natural extension of the Lieder tradition. The harmony is thick with allusion and the weight of 200 years of German song, while the vocal line is cognisant of the history of Romanticism and Expressionism. Rihm has created a major addition to the art song repertoire in every respect.