During the city’s cultural lockdown, three Viennese artists present works relevant to our times.

The Bösendorfer Salon in the Wiener Musikverein sets the online stage.

 

The Four Songs of Farewell, op.14 by Erich Wolfgang Korngold celebrate their centennial jubilee this year. Soprano Arabella Fenyves, well-known to Austrian classical music lovers through her weekly show on radio klassik Stephansdom, sings about love, the pain of separation, and longing. The music is just as fresh today as it was in 1921. Korngold encoded his love for his wife-to-be Luzi von Sonnenthal into the songs. Their families actively tried to prevent their relationship. A real drama!

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Frédéric Chopin’s famous Raindrop Prelude op.28 Nr 15 was created on the island of Mallorca. Chopin and his great love, the trailblazing female novelist known by the pseudonym George Sand, lived there together. She had gone out for a walk when a big storm broke. He waited anxiously for her return- and immortalized the storm in this music. Chopin was in the vanguard of impressionism. Virtuoso pianist Ineke Hellingman plays on a new Bösendorfer model 230 VC.

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Claude Debussy wrote his musical legacy for violin and piano in 1917: the violin sonata in g minor L.140. In his dying days, the father of impressionism wrote his last work during the turmoil of World War I and just before the outbreak of the Spanish Flu. A work of timeless classical beauty. Violinist Angelina Georgiadi passionately traces his return to the roots of French music paired with exotic influences from other parts of the world. A dreamy escape.