Page 534 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Heine protagonist suffers very deeply indeed, to the point of mania: have the beating of the heart
equated with a hammering coffin-maker ever struck such trenchant blows before, physical reality
rather than metaphor, and who has ever experienced “Ich grolle nicht” (“I don’t complain”), so
often excerpted as a conventionally passionate number, delivered with such colossal force and
focus? Schuen was in the world of each journey right from the start, expressing emotion so
perfectly that it didn’t seem like acting, holding and responding to the mood of the piano codas
right through to the long, aching benediction that falls at the end of Dichterliebe. With so many
interpreters, even the much-vaunted Lieder-lovers’ delight Christian Gerhaher, falling short of the
ideal in one realm or another, for me, at any rate, and Schuen in tandem with Drake reaching
what felt like sheer perfection, is it fatuous to hail him as the new Fischer-Dieskau, with an
approach and a colour-palette all his own?

Schuen and Drake reaffirmed the dimension of direct communication with an audience from
which I’d been reeling in Dublin recitals by Abel Selaocoe and the accordion duo of Dermot
Dunne and Martin Tourish, and which by comparison I’d missed in the admirable spotlight on all
three Brahms violin sonatas as played on the Saturday morning by “festival featured musician”
Daniel Pioro and pianist Simon Smith (pictured below). Sure, have the music in front of you for
security, but look at your partner once in a while, and at least visibly suggest connection with the
audience.

Not that the grasp of each sonata wasn’t magisterial, with ideal soaring from the violinist and
focused articulation from the pianist often verging on the supernaturally beautiful at times. It’s a
matter of taste as to what tone you want from your violinist, and I’d have preferred one at the
start of the G major masterpiece more suggestive of radiant at-one-with-the-world-ness – Vadim
Repin told me this was his favourite work of all for that very reason – and cool control of vibrato
verging on detached objectivity was Pioro’s preferred mode. Still, the intervalless sequence was