Andrè Schuen and Pere Arquillué, love for the sung and recited word in Vilabertran

The August nights at the Vilabertran Schubertiad are always a guarantee of quality and excellence. Even more so when the program features baritone Andrè Schuen, one of today's great lied specialists, a fixture in the Empordà festival's programming since his debut there in 2018. This year he starred in a particularly brilliant and original recital alongside his usual pianist, Daniel Heide, and the Terrassa-born actor Pere Arquillué, who acted as narrator.

The program was entirely dedicated to Johannes Brahms' Die schöne Magelone, a cycle of fifteen luminous and vital songs about the medieval love story between the knight Peter of Provence and Magalona, daughter of the King of Naples, rewritten in 1797 by Ludwig Tieck. Schuen and Heide performed the lieds with mastery, and Arquillué, with his deep and clear voice, between each piece, narrated as a storyteller parts of the remaining fragments of the original text. The result is an alternation between sung and spoken voice, unusual in the world of lied, but especially pertinent and interesting.

Brahms' fifteen songs, composed between 1861 and 1869, take the poems that conclude each chapter of the medieval tale recovered by Tieck, so that, on their own, they do not allow the entire storyline to be reconstructed. Therefore, over the years, in live performances of the cycle, the custom of incorporating a narrator to complete the plot was established, as Arquillué did at the Canònica de Vilabertran. Admittedly, this option detracts somewhat from the music's prominence, as it does not allow for a total atmosphere of listening, silence, and contemplation to be consolidated, but at the same time, it enhances the work's theatrical and dramatic dimension, which is equally essential in the lied genre.

In his performances, Schuen, with a solid, well-founded voice and exceptional control of the fiato, moved through the entire range with captivating naturalness, going from a gallant expansion to the most delicate thread of voice without ever losing the line. Without forcing the timbre or overacting, the baritone turns every inflection of the voice into a truly expressive and extraordinarily communicative extension of speech. Alongside him, Daniel Heide governed the harmonic and contrapuntal complexity of Brahms, with his interwoven lines and inner voices that, in this cycle, less tormented and introspective, dialogue with a popular and adventurous spirit.

And as an interlocutor for this magnificent duo, Arquillué took the stage, an authentic man of the theater, who with a solemn cadence, clear diction, and minimal gestures, captivated the entire audience of the church by narrating the courtly love between two lovers separated by misfortune and reunited by happy chance.