Dichterlos – A recital with Mikhail Timoshenko

Following his debut as a stand-in with the Musikkollegium Winterthur last season, baritone Mikhail Timoshenko is now returning to Winterthur. This time he is joined at the piano by his long-standing duet partner, Elitsa Desseva. The pair have made a name for themselves internationally as outstanding lieder interpreters; their carefully curated lieder programmes have been honoured with numerous awards. One can look forward to their interpretation of Schumann’s famous ‘Dichterliebe’: in this song cycle, the vocal and piano parts are equal and intertwine. Despite all the melancholy and pain that pervade the texts and the music, a restrained optimism often emerges in the extended piano postludes.
The songs of the ‘Elegie’, a major song cycle for baritone and chamber orchestra by the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck, are also characterised by a sense of pain and loneliness. The music is sombre and introspective for long stretches: perhaps the composer’s grappling with his unhappy relationship with the pianist Mary de Senger – or rather a fully composed farewell to Romanticism, as the musical avant-garde moved towards a place that Schoeck no longer understood? The music does indeed respond to contemporary trends, as seen in Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’; this makes the final song, ‘Komm, Trost der Welt, du stille Nacht’, all the more striking as it leaves behind the harmonic complexity of the preceding songs to find solace in a simple lullaby melody.