{"id":6019,"date":"2026-04-06T23:27:57","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T23:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/?p=6019"},"modified":"2026-04-06T23:36:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T23:36:49","slug":"a-serious-schubert-evening-with-goerne-in-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/06\/a-serious-schubert-evening-with-goerne-in-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"A Serious Schubert Evening with Goerne in Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Grande salle Pierre Boulez, 27 March 2026<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This Schubertian triptych closed under the sign of the unexpected. The three concerts programmed at the Philharmonie de Paris this March were to bring together Matthias Goerne and Daniil Trifonov, a pairing announced as one of the highlights of the season. But Trifonov, forced to withdraw for health reasons, left the piano bench vacant for the entire cycle. The Philharmonie kept all three evenings on the calendar, entrusting the accompaniment to Martin Helmchen, a long-standing artistic partner of the German baritone. A substitution that, from the first night, ceased to feel like one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this third and final evening on Friday 27 March, the grande salle drew a strong crowd. Parisian audiences are loyal to Schubert, and they are certainly loyal to Goerne. The programme was formidable in its internal logic: the Sonata in G major D 894 in the first half, then, after the interval, the complete Schwanengesang<\/em> framing the lied Herbst<\/em> D 945, placed between the two song groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helmchen opened the evening alone, with the D 894 Sonata. The work that Schumann once called “the most perfect of all in spirit and form” was, for commercial reasons, rebranded by the publisher Haslinger as a Fantaisie<\/em> during Schubert’s lifetime, and the nickname stuck for decades. The Berlin pianist is currently recording a complete Schubert sonata cycle for Alpha Classics, the first volume of which appeared in October 2025, and he was entirely at home here. His touch, precise and yielding at once, served the near-stillness of the opening movement with authority, that suspension of time which is among the most distinctive qualities of late Schubert. The central Andante found a rare balance between Mozartian simplicity and something more wayward, less easily resolved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Goerne entered. The Schwanengesang<\/em> is not a cycle in any strict sense. It was Haslinger who, receiving the manuscripts from the composer’s brother a month after Schubert’s death in November 1828, assembled them under that evocative title, splicing the Rellstab songs with the Heine settings and appending a final lied on a text by Seidl. This posthumous patchwork, Goerne and Helmchen inhabited with a coherence that made one almost forget the seams. The baritone’s voice, dark and full-bodied, asserted itself from the opening Liebesbotschaft<\/em> with a great ease. The contrast with the Heine songs, more abrasive and stripped back, was all the sharper for it. Der Atlas<\/em>, Die Stadt<\/em>, Der Doppelg\u00e4nger<\/em>: these pages of unsettling modernity were delivered without artifice or expressive excess, which gave them precisely their full force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Grande salle Pierre Boulez, with its vineyard-style seating and a reverberation time tuned to sit comfortably between the demands of orchestral and chamber repertoire, served this programme unusually well. The intimacy of a lied recital can get lost in a hall of that size, but the room’s capacity to focus sound without hardening it kept Helmchen’s softest pianissimos audible and Goerne’s darkest low notes present without bloom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grande salle Pierre Boulez, 27 March 2026 This Schubertian triptych closed under the sign of the unexpected. The three concerts programmed at the Philharmonie de Paris this March were to bring together Matthias Goerne and Daniil Trifonov, a pairing announced as one of the highlights of the season. But Trifonov, forced to withdraw for health … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22],"tags":[34,38,40,39,43,37,42,36,41],"class_list":["post-6019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-reviews","tag-analysis","tag-classical","tag-critics","tag-journal","tag-magazine","tag-music","tag-news","tag-newspaper","tag-review","infinite-scroll-item"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6021,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6019\/revisions\/6021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/opustribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}