Anna Prohaska, Soprano
Julius Drake, Piano

Soprano Soprano Anna Prohaska and Pianist Julius Drake come together once again to present selections from their highly praised album “Paradise Lost”

“This project, which has been two years in the making, finds Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake exploring music on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment.

Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a temptress who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette.

John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection.”

Programme:
Maurice Ravel:
Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis (from Trois chansons)
Air du Feu (from L’enfant et les sortilèges)

Olivier Messiaen:
Bonjour toi, colombe verte (from Harawi)

Gabriel Fauré:
La chanson d’Ève

Claude Debussy:
Apparition

Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur:
Ce qu’Adam dit à Ève

Igor Stravinsky:
Pastorale

Hugo Wolf:
Die Spröde (from Goethe-Lieder)
Die Bekehrte (from Goethe-Lieder)

Johannes Brahms:
Salamander (from Fünf Lieder)

Aribert Reimann:
Gib mir den Apfel (from Kinderlieder)

Benjamin Britten:
A Poison Tree

Hans Pfitzner:
Röschen biß den Apfel an (from Alte Weisen)

Sergei Rachmaninoff:
Au…! (from Zes liederen)

Charles Ives:
Evening

Henry Purcell:
Sleep, Adam, sleep and take thy rest

Franz Schubert:
Auflösung
Abendstern

Robert Schumann:
Jetzt sank des Abends gold’ner Schein (from Das Paradies und die Peri)
Warte, warte, wilder Schiffsmann (from Liederkreis)

Hanns Eisler:
Jeden Morgen, mein Brot zu verdienen (from Die Hollywood-Elegien)
Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt (from Die Hollywood-Elegien)

Gustav Mahler:
Das irdische Leben (from Des Knaben Wunderhorn)

George Crumb:
Wind Elegy (from Three Early Songs)

Leonard Bernstein:
Silhouette (Galilee)