01.05.2025

JULIAN PRÉGARDIEN | Spotlight on Lied

Julian Prégardien has become a permanent fixture on the concert scene as a recitalist and creator of new formats and lied programmes. The coming months promise an array of concerts and recitals in a calendar as thriving as his ideas.

The tenor is the artist in residence at this year's Schwetzingen Festival and will perform three recitals throughout the period. On the first evening (5 May), he puts the audience's wishes centre stage in a concert of lieder curated by their requests. On two further evenings (16 & 17 May), he will take a look at Goethe and women from different perspectives under the title ‘The blind spot’. Torn between longing for love and the inability to make a lasting commitment, Goethe fell in love with numerous women, desired them, then left them again, fell in love with new ones and wrote countless words about them and his feelings on paper. On these two evenings, Julian Prégardien and Kristian Bezuidenhout explore the question of who the women were to whom Goethe lost his heart.

The Serenade for tenor, horn and strings is one of the first works Britten composed for his partner Peter Pears. Julian Prégardien can be heard performing this moving work with the Munich Chamber Orchestra in Ravensburg, Munich and at the Mozartfest in Würzburg.

Schubert set Wilhelm Müller's poems to music in a unique way and characterised the art of song in the Romantic period. Schubert composed ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ in 1823. 200 years later, Julian Prégardien and Kristian Bezuidenhout dedicated themselves to a highly acclaimed new recording of the famous song cycle on a replica of an original fortepiano by Conrad Graf. The two gifted musicians are now passionately bringing this romantic tale of unrequited love to life in recitals at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid and the Vienna Konzerthaus.

Together with Sir András Schiff, he performs Schubert's ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ at the Omaggio a Palladio Festival in Vicenza and with Daniel Heide he can be heard with this unique cycle in Bad Schallerbach and at the chamber music festival in Lockenhaus.

The list of lieder recitals goes on and on, as Julian Prégardien has also appeared as a lieder singer in Dortmund, at the Heidelberger Frühling, at the opening concert of Liedstadt in Weimar, at the Hombroich Island Festival, in Saarbrücken, at the Gezeitenfestival, at the Schubertiade in Hohenems and at the festival in Peralada.