RAFAEL FINGERLOS Y RUBÉN FDEZ. AGUIRRE

Austrian baritone Rafael Fingerlos and Bilbao-born pianist Rubén Fdez. Aguirre contrast different musical conceptions of the absence of the beloved in this concert, creating a true emotional crescendo. The figure of the distant, idealised and longed-for beloved becomes the poetic axis shared — from very different starting points — by Beethoven and Schubert. With his Op. 98, the former also created the first song cycle conceived as an interconnected whole, inseparable from its parts, a new concept that Schubert, far more naturally attuned to the medium, would later bring to full splendour.

There is no conclusive evidence that Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert ever truly met, despite living in the same city. This recital imagines such an encounter in the form of a dialogue between their two parallel careers in Vienna during the 1820s, seeking to draw a cross-portrait of two composers who, like railway tracks, advanced side by side into territory where no one had gone before.

In collaboration with the Juan March Foundation in Madrid.