Recital with Marlis Petersen

Slender, luminous, richly nuanced: Marlis Petersen has a voice with which she effortlessly achieves the balance between enchanting lyricism and vivid expressiveness. She is justifiably one of the leading lieder and opera singers of our time, with a repertoire ranging from George Frideric Handel’s Alcina to Aribert Reimann’s Medea. Marlis Petersen thrills audiences throughout the world with her radiant coloratura soprano – in Vienna, at the Bavarian State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the festivals in Salzburg and Aix-en-Provence. She also appears as a concert singer on all the major stages, including with Berliner Philharmoniker, with whom she was heard in orchestral and chamber concerts as Artist in Residence during the 2019/20 season. She particularly loves to sing lieder, which she did not discover until relatively late in her career: “I had a revelation with an opera coach in Vienna, who could play fantastically like an orchestra and had a great affinity for the lied. We simply started to sight-read all the Schumann, Schubert and Brahms volumes. Before we knew it, a whole programme had developed from all the songs that we had marked with an ‘x’.” What is particularly important to her during the concert? “That something is conveyed emotionally from me on the stage to the auditorium – and that the audience can understand the text.”

That Stephan Matthias Lademann would become a musical team player someday was clear to the native of Meißner at an early age: he discovered his passion for chamber music and song accompaniment while still studying piano at the Dresden College of Music. After his escape from East Germany, he was the artistic partner of Siegfried Jerusalem and has accompanied other renowned singers such as Diana Damrau, Edita Gruberova, Robert Dean Smith and Marlis Petersen – sometimes with percussive force, sometimes with subtle restraint. Stephan Matthias Lademann has also served as the accompanist for master classes with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Birgit Nilsson and Thomas Quasthoff. Concert tours with song recitals and chamber music concerts have taken him to international festivals in Germany and many musical centres of Europe, America and Asia. His discography includes a live recording of a song recital with Diana Damrau at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, a recording of Gustav Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn in the original piano version, a recording of Mahler’s Lied von der Erde in the version for tenor, baritone and piano as well as the album Dimensionen-Welt (Dimensions-World) with Marlis Petersen, which received the French Record Critics’ Award in 2018.