Ian Bostridge 2010/11
The great British tenor Ian Bostridge is coming to the Philharmonie as artist in residence for the 2010/11 season. After Pierre-Laurent Aimard (2005/06) and Tabea Zimmermann (2007/08), he is the third of a series of remarkable musical personalities that you will be able to get to know better than just through single concerts. This is particularly worthwhile for the most personal of all musical instruments – the voice, as a glance at his programme selection clearly demonstrates: virtuoso opera arias of the baroque in the cycle «Voyage dans le temps», a «Récital vocal» with one of the central Lieder cycles of the romantic age, a «Loopino» concert for children, a two-day Schubertiade and, in conclusion, a grand concert opera production and (in November 2011) as soloist with the OPL in two of the major works of Benjamin Britten (1913–1976).

 

Such an eclectic repertoire is a matter of course for Ian Bostridge. On the one hand he sees close links between the baroque and the 20th century (especially in Britten). On the other, while he feels that every piece of music needs the right style and expression, even the most varied aspects of music are gathered together in his personal perspective: «All my singing stems from my Lieder singing, and it is that sort of connection to the emotion of the piece and the text that really animates what I do in all the music.»

 

He learnt that music is a wholly natural part of everyday life when he was just a little boy – and for this he is still grateful to his very first teachers. (This is why his encounter with an audience of 3 to 5-year-olds in the «Loopino» cycle is perhaps one of the most important during his stays in Luxembourg; after all singing simply belongs to life for him with his own children too). Perhaps there is something of a family tradition in the career of this untypical star tenor, one that goes much further back than the children’s choir experiences of his London childhood – his famous relative James Joyce was an outstanding tenor, and fascination with the music of language links him to his literary forebear: «The sound of the words is part of the music as well.»

 

It is precisely the inexplicable in music that magically attracts this 1990 Oxford history graduate. With his dissertation on witchcraft around 1700, according to the Times Literary Supplement he achieved «that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-known subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again.» Good for music that since his Wigmore Hall debut in 1993 and his lightning opera successes from 1994 on he has concentrated wholly on the magic of song – for this is a feat where his success is all the greater. You can meet him in person at the Philharmonie from October 2010 to November 2011.