Schubert – Die Schöne Müllerin
This year we are adding lieder to the repertoire. Baritone, Jonathan Sells, will on 2 June perform the complete Schubert song cycle, Die Schöne Mülle rin with Simon Lane, in very much an equal role in this cycle, at the piano. The intimacy of venue here could hardly be more appropriate for the appreciation of this intensely personal song cycle which moves from naïve joy to despair at unrequited love and which would have been performed in salons and small scale venues like ours.
Jonathan Sells is recently graduated from the International Opera Studio at the Zurich Opera House. He gained distinctions both at Cambridge University (Music and Musicology) a nd on the opera course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (studying with Raymond Connell and Janice Chapman ), where he was subsequently a Guildhall Artist Fellow. In 2009, he won the Rose Bowl at the Guildhall Gold Medal, and was awarded the Prix Thierry Mermod for singers at the Verbier Festival Academy and the Worshipful Company of Musi cians’ Silver Medal. He was awarded the bronze Gottlob Frick Medal in 2011.
Operatic roles include Bottom, Montev erdi’s Orfeo, Don Alfonso, Count Almaviva, Leporello, Der König (Orff Die Kluge ), Rossini’s Bartolo and Figaro, and Slook (Rossini La Cambiale di matrimonio), with companies including Opéra de Paris, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Teatro Real, Madrid and Ope rnhaus Zürich. In concert he works regularly with John Eliot Gardiner and William Christie, and has recorded a number of discs with I Fagiolini.
Jonathan Sells studied French song with Malcolm Martineau on the Britten – Pears Young Artist Programme and German Lieder with Graham Johnson at the GSMD, and considers song performance a very important part of his work. He gave his debut recital at Wigmore Hall in 2010, h as sung at Leeds Lieder+, London Song Festival, City of London Festival, and Chelsea Schubert Festival, and gave the world pr emiere in May of Edward Rushton’s 40 – minute scena for baritone and piano, Pandora, organische Maschine in 2012.
Simon Lane leads a diverse musical life performing both with instrumentalists and singers, and his performing takes him across the UK as well as Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark and North America. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, with Mark Ray and Dina Parakhina, and subsequently graduated with Distinction from the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his teachers were Michael Dussek and Julius Drake. In his early life he was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral.
Simon has performed at venues such as Wigmore Hall, St. George’s, Bristol, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, and the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, and has collaborated with artists including Allan Clayton, Iestyn Davies, Peter Harvey, Sophie Daneman, Guy Johnston, Jack Liebeck, Nathaniel Boyd, Philip Higham, Gemma Rosefield, Katie Stillman, the Navarra, Badke, Brodowski and Barbirolli String Quartets, and the Bozza Wind Ensemble. He is also a founder member of the Atalanta Piano Quartet alongside Cecilia Ber nadini, Tom Hankey and Nathaniel Boyd.
In 2009 he was the recipient of the Accompanists’ Prize in the Royal Overseas League Music Competition, and has received many other awards including the Sir Henry Richardson Scholarship administered by the MBF, a Co untess of Munster Education Award, and both the Elena Gerhardt Lieder Prize and the Brenda Webb Award at the Royal Academy of Music. Future plans include recitals with Lana Trotovsek, Rakhi Singh, ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ with Jonathan Sells, and the fourth y ear of ‘Simon Lane and Friends’, a series of concerts in Bromley, Kent.