Page 519 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He first came to prominence when his novel about the
Holocaust, The Emigrants, was published in English in 1996. The critic Susan Sontag said it was ‘an
astonishing masterpiece’.

I think that Larcher’s 20-minute work, scored for prepared piano, was astonishing to say the least. A
cycle of 13 very short sections, the work was gracefully and meticulously sung by Schuen with the
composer acting as the page-turner for Julius Drake while assisting him in the complexities of the
oddities of the score such as using their fingers either to damp the strings, pluck them or bend their
pitch while metal rods were evenly placed on the strings to achieve a propeller-type effect. Even the
frame of the piano was struck with a handle of a screwdriver for a couple of songs. The overall effect,
however, worked wonders adding greatly to the attraction of the piece with Schuen completely at
ease delivering a confident, well-assured, detailed performance.

Opening with Schumann’s Liederkreis, a cycle of 12 musical settings of poems by Joseph von
Eichendorff, forming an important part of the romantic art-song repertoire, the recital ended with
Schumann’s Dichterlibe (A Poet's Love) dating from 1840 and the composer’s best-known song-cycle.
The texts for its 16 songs come from Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine written in 1822-23.
Along with the song-cycles of Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise) they form the core of
the genre in musical literature.