Up, and Coming:
Art Song On The Couch:
The Lied In Freud’s Vienna

Concert

Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, pianists

For many years, pianists Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, artistic directors of The New York Festival of Song, have produced a long line of noteworthy concerts – they are now in their twenty-sixth season – imaginatively conceived amalgamations of vocal works, frequently drawing in inventive ways from classical, and sometimes more popular, sources. Promising to be interesting, engaging and fun, as well as of the highest musical caliber, these vocal and pianistic adventures often explore suggestive themes that draw their component elements together. Bringing not only unbridled talent and mastery into an intimate musical space, these artist-impresarios offer the promise to embellish their first-rate artistry with warmth, wit and intelligently wry commentary.

Bringing their musical marvels to the wonderful hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum next month from their home base in New York City, they offer a program that should appeal not only to music lovers but also to the many psychotherapeutically adept and appreciative souls who abound in and around this fair town.

On a quick glance, the title of the program, Art Song On The Couch: The Lied In Freud’s Vienna, interestingly drew out of me several immediate Freudian reconstructions. I looked quickly at the title and said to myself: “Art Song On the Couch: They Lied …” and thought: Who lied? About what? And why? Then, as quickly, I saw couch and lied and immediately figured semiconsciously, shouldn’t it actually be lay or lain?

Of course, neither of those is what lied actually refers to here, but to the form of art song that had its beginnings in Germany in the nineteenth century, and which prmomises to be on brilliant display in this concert.

Here is the official spiel from New York Festival of Song:

In the early years of the twentieth century the Lied became the an arena for exploring hidden feelings and desires, mirroring the ground-breaking ideas in the air. Richard Strauss brought Shakespeare’s Ophelia into the analyst’s office; Gustav Mahler had a life-changing encounter with Freud; and German art song found new depths of psychological and musical complexity.

Don’t miss this concert; reschedule your therapy if need be. It is most certain to be a sonorously rich and an interpretively nuanced outing, likely seasoned with thoughtfully warm and witty verbal embellishments.

– BADMan