Thomas Guthrie’s new arrangement of Schubert’s Die Schöne Mullerin with the Alehouse Boys released on Rubicon Classics kicks off/marks the 200th anniversary of this song cycle, bringing back the playful, reinvention the composer and his friends could/might recognise. Guthrie BaS

Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise has none of the bright optimism of his earlier Die schöne Müllerin. The spring day of ‘Das Wandern’ is now the cold frozen dusk of ‘Gute Nacht’. Our hero starts off isolated, leaving town in the

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) wrote over 600 vocal works, one of the oddest and yet most powerful of which is a ballad about a Queen, her dwarf, and a fatal encounter. The story opens in the middle of the night: we

If you ask music lovers to name a composer who died too young, many will think of Mozart, who died just a month before his 36th birthday, in the midst of composing his Requiem. Of course, the loss of Mozart

In December 1822, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was awarded a Diploma of Honour from the Styrian Music Society in Graz. As a way of saying thank you, he sent two movements of a symphony he was working on, noting that it

To start with, I have to confess that although I have long been fond of Schubert, he hasn’t been among my “favourites” (if such a term is appropriate). Somehow, I have found a barrier between Schubert and me that prevented

“I love the vulnerability of Schubert. I love the fragility. I love the lack of resolution. In a way, it’s the most real and human music.” – Paul Lewis Schubert: Piano Sonata in A Major D. 664, II. Andante |

One of the great delights of Franz Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s poem Erlkönig is all the voices that appear in the work: in the vocal line, we have the narrator, the father, the child, and the Erl-king. The piano is