Prize winners:
Florian Störtz, baritone & Mark Rogers, piano
Clara Barbier Serrano, soprano & Joanna Kacperek, piano
Visit the overall festival with as much as 40% discount!
€309 instead of €515
Thursday 22 May €36 instead of €45.
normal rate € 25,-
rate < 30 years € 0,-
During this recital, you will hear two up-and-coming, award-winning young duos giving their take on the song recital of the future. Baritone Florian Störtz and pianist Mark Rogers convincingly won our Young Artist Platform in 2024. Soprano Clara Barbier Serrano and pianist Joanna Kacperek won the International Song Festival Zeist Engagement Prize at the Hugo Wolf Wettbewerb in September that year.
Future music - what is the music of the future? Florian Störtz and Mark Rogers put together a programme focusing on our perspective on the human mind in the light of current and future innovations. Perhaps the most important, recent innovation is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which allows a machine to perform human skills such as reasoning, learning, planning and creating. They built their programme with a song at its centre that is the ultimate symbol of 'music of the future'. For the lyrics and music are generated with the help of AI Is AI the miraculous machine that Purcell is already hinting at? Does the human mind degenerate into madness, will the future glorify reason and repress grief? Questions that bring to mind Schubert when he said of his songs: 'My musical creations have come into the world thanks to my intellect and thanks to my sorrows; the songs that spring only from sorrows seem to please people the most'.
Clara Barbier Serrano and Joanna Kacperek ask: what will musical life look like in a hundred years? What impact will social and technological innovations have on the arts? After all, what if venues have to close due to ever new rounds of budget cuts? What if new technologies and AI make musicians redundant? What will the music of the future sound like? The spectre is a world where there is no more 'salon life', or at most still on online platforms or as 'selfies' filmed in one's own living rooms. But innovation can also be enriching.
Clara and Joanna take you on a journey through the imagination. To do so, they explore and radically change the traditional form of a recital. At the same time, they look for ways to pass on deeply human feelings as captured in song over the centuries. After all, romantic music and the romantic world of ideas fits with standing out against technology and outside control, but is also a medium to express and share our vulnerability. In a theatrical setting, they connect our present time with the past and the future using songs by Robert and Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn, Ethel Smythe, Hanns Eisler, Pauline Viardot, Georges Aperghis, Isabel Mundry and others.
Winners Young Artist Platform 2024
Florian Störz, baritone
Mark Rogers, piano
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
Nunc gaudeant maternal viscera
Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Wond'rous machine (from: Hail! bright Cecilia Z. 328; Brady)
Henri Duparc (1848-1933)
La vie antérieure (Baudelaire)
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
In five-score summers (from: I said to Love op. 19b; Hardy)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Before life and after (from: Winter Words; Hardy)
Margarete Schweikert (1887-1957)
Die Entschlafenen (Hölderlin)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Täuschung (from: Winterreise; Müller)
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Opus suum (AI)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Irrlicht (from: Winterreise; Müller)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Bessie Bobtail at. 2 (Stephens)
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
I felt a funeral in my brain (from: Emily Dickinson Songs)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Die Krähe (from: Winterreise; Müller)
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Vom künftigen Alter op. 87/1 (from: Vier Gesänge; Rückert)
break
The programme of Clara Barbier Serrano and Joanna Kacperek will follow soon.
Florian Störtz / bass-baritone
Florian Störtz graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London. Störtz is a promising musician with performances in concert halls and at festivals across Europe. In the process, he collaborated with leading Lieder pianists such as Graham Johnson and Helmut Deutsch. He won many awards, including already during his training in London for his interpretations of opera and song repertoire. In 2023, he stood out at the International Handel Singing Competition, the Helmut Deutsch Song Competition and - with pianist Mark Rogers - the International Voice-Piano Competition 'Lili et Nadia Boulanger' where they won first prize. At the 2024 festival, they convincingly won the Young Artist Platform. Störtz is an alumnus of the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme and currently participates in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's two-year talent development programme.
Mark Rogers / piano
Mark Rogers completed his bachelor's degree at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London with James Baillieu, Malcolm Martineau and Michael Dussek. He specialised in vocal and chamber music and took master classes with Christian Gerhaher and Felicity Lott, among others. With his regular duo partner baritone Florian Störtz, he won the Prix de Mélodie at the Concours Nadia et Lili Boulanger, the audience and first prize at the Helmut Deutsch Lieder Concours and the engagement prize of our Young Artist Platform in 2024.
Rogers can regularly be heard in recitals across Europe collaborating with a variety of musicians. He is also correpetitor at the Oxenfoord International Summer School and writes programme notes for Wigmore Hall.
Clara Barbier Serrano / soprano
Clara Barbier Serrano studied successively at the Hochschule für Musik in Leipzig, the Royal College of Music International Opera Studio and the Conservatoire de Paris. Barbier Serrano received many awards after participating in competitions such as the International Student LiedDuo Competition and the ASAO nuevas voces. With her duo partner, pianist Joanna Kacperek, she participated in the Oxford Young Artist Programme. As a duo, they won second prize at the Hugo Wolf Wettbewerb in 2024.
Barbier Serrano has since performed several opera roles, and conveys her passion for the art song to audiences during the song recitals she has already performed across Europe. Interdisciplinary projects and contemporary repertoire play an important role in her musical journey and she has already premiered several works.
Joanna Kacperek / piano
Joanna Kacperek studied at the Chopin Conservatory in Warsaw and subsequently at the Royal College of Music in London. She took master classes with many renowned musicians including Dina Yoffe, Boris Berman, Nikolai Demidenko, Bernd Goetzke and Krzysztof Jabłoński, and won many prizes and scholarships. She is now a much sought-after pianist with solo performances and appearances as a song pianist in major venues worldwide. In September 2024, her debut album Variations which received rave reviews from the press.
With her duo partner, soprano Clara Barbier Serrano, she also made her debut at Wigmore Hall in 2024, where they won the 'Jean Meikle Prize'. Also that autumn, they won second prize at the Hugo Wolf Wettbewerb.
Large church hall / Zusterplein 12 / 3703 CB Zeist
Baritone Florian Störtz has a voice of striking quality and suppleness, which he uses in the service of music and lyrics.
Clara Barbier Serrano is a 'spitfire' soprano, whose exemplary high range and technical finesse, with all the spice of contemporaneity, make her a soprano of the modern world.
The young pianist Joanna Kacperek has a rainbow of poetic and colourful imagination at her disposal, as well as the technique to bring those ideas to life.
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Oxford Song
Schubertiada Vilabertran
IVC
VvhL
Idea art house
EBG
Royal Conservatoire
Song duo competition
Municipality of Zeist
Province of Utrecht
August Fentener van Vlissingen
Carel Nengerman
The Lancey
Dioraphte
Elise Mathilde
Elja foundation
Fentener van Vlissingen SHV
KFHein
Culture Fund
Sena Performers
Woudschoten
van Baaren foundation
Van den Berch van Heemstede
Van Bijlevelt Foundation
Truus and Gerrit van Riemsdijk Stiftung
Mien van 't Sant Fund
Lisman + Lisman
Broekhuis
Counts
