Review: Leeds Lieder Festival 2024, Benjamin Appl and Sholto Kynoch

YOU could have heard the proverbial drop of a pin in the 350-seat capacity Venue at Leeds Conservatoire as a rapt audience listened to one of the great voices of our time.

Celebrated German-British lyric baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist Sholto Kynoch began the Festival’s closing recital with the Gregorianischer Chorale, Domine Exaudi - Hear my prayer O Lord and let my crying come unto thee. Appl sang this from off-stage: the voice of an angel floated into the auditorium from heaven knows where.

Singer and pianist united centre stage for Franz Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen - Death and the Maiden - and Monteverdi’s Tu se’ morta - Have you perished? from his opera Orfeo. Then came Schubert’s Ins stille land! - Into the silent land!

Appl’s genious for colouring a word or phrase with the meaning of life - or death, has few equals. Those lucky enough to have experienced his performance in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at Leeds Town Hall in November 2018 will concur. Since then, Appl’s interpretative insight has deepened and his dynamic range is even more thrilling. As demonstrated in two delightful songs by American composer Charles Ives: the youthul exuberance of Circus Band, followed by the golly, gee-whiz! innocence of Memories A (pleasant) and B (very sad).

Appl and Sholto’s sensitively curated programme had been designed to explore silences between notes. Nowhere were the silences more harrowing than in the setting by James MacMillan of “Children’. Verses inspired by Scottish poet William Soutar’s anguish from dead and injured children in the Spanish Civil War.

MacMillan’s vocal line employs only a few basic intervals and is redolent of a child’s song. A sparse piano accompaniment is punctuated by huge, cataclysmic chords and pauses in devastating contrast to the song’s essential innocence: “Death came from the sky on a sunny afternoon. Upon the street they lie beside the broken stone: The blood of children stares from the broken stone.” More than 13,800 children have been killed and over 12,000 children injured by Israeli raids in Gaza, as the world looks on.

Morgen! by Richard Strauss offered tentative hope for a brighter future “..and tomorrow the sun will shine again”. A precious moment of silence before the storm of applause erupted. Appl and Kynoch ended their amazing recital with the Wanderers Nachtlied by Schubert.

Watch 22 recitals from Leeds Lieder Festival 2024, free on YouTube at: https://leedslieder.org.uk/click-here-to-watch-our-festival-livestreams/