Schubert’s Winterreise

Schubert’s profound and tragic late song cycle is a concert-length setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. Baritone Thomas Meglioranza joins EEC favorite David Breitman, fortepianist in the acoustically & aesthetically gorgeous meetinghouse in Francestown.

Thomas Meglioranza graduated from Grinnell College and the Eastman School of Music. He was a winner of the Walter W. Naumburg, Concert Artists Guild, Franz Schubert/Music of Modernity, and Joy in Singing competitions. Highlights from recent seasons include an all-Hugo Wolf recital at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the role of Lord Henry in Lowell Liebermann’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with Odyssey Opera, and Bach’s solo bass cantatas with the Lyra Baroque Orchestra. In addition to Messiahs, Carmina Buranas, and Bach passions with many US orchestras, he has also sung Copland’s Old American Songs with the National Symphony, Eight Songs for a Mad King with the LA Philharmonic, Bach cantatas with Les Violons du Roy, and John Harbison’s Fifth Symphony with the Boston Symphony. His operatic roles include Mozart’s Count Almaviva and Don Giovanni, Pierrot in Die tote Stadt, Chou En-Lai in Nixon in China and Prior Walter in Peter Eötvös’ Angels in America. With pianist Reiko Uchida, he has given recitals around the world and recorded albums of Schubert lieder, Winterreise and Fauré’s La bonne chanson. His discography also includes orchestral songs of Virgil Thomson with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Bach cantatas with the Taverner Consort. His music festival appearances include the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, as well as Ravinia, Tanglewood, Aspen, and Marlboro. He is a Visiting Artist at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge.

Pianist David Breitman directs the Historical Performance program at Oberlin. He is equally at home with the fortepiano and the modern piano, and enjoys both solo and ensemble playing. Recent seasons have included Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto and Choral Fantasy on both historical and modern pianos, and several performances at the renowned Cobbe Collection of historical instruments outside of London. His collaboration with baritone Sanford Sylvan spans more than thirty years, with several hundred recitals and four CD’s, ranging from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, to the premiere recording of The Glass Hammer, a major song cycle by the Cuban-American composer Jorge Martin. He has recorded the Mozart piano-violin sonatas on historical instruments with Jean-François Rivest for Analekta, and, in a collaboration of a different sort, he is one of seven fortepianists on the 10-CD recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle on CLAVES. Breitman’s most recent projects involve more Beethoven: a recording of the violin sonatas with Elizabeth Wallfisch will be complete by the end of 2012; the cello sonatas with Jaap ter Linden are projected for 2013. He now shares his enthusiasm for this repertoire with students in the courses “Performing Beethoven’s violin/cello sonatas,” and is currently working on a book titled “Time-Travel for Pianists: How Today’s Players Can Learn from Yesterday’s Instruments.”