Zwerg

“Meine Seele weinte” ("My soul wept") is the title of the versatile mezzo-soprano Natalya Boeva's new CD featuring lieder spanning a wide variety of epochs, languages, and styles. It is a co-production of GENUIN and the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Together with her piano partner Polina Spirina, the winner of the ARD International Music Competition in Voice 2018 immerses herself in an exciting selection of works by the great lied composers Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Karol Szymanowski and the contemporary Russian composers Alexander Labyrich and Dmitri Smirnov. Arguably no other genre can probe the most intimate human feelings of deep sorrow and quiet hope as profoundly as the lied. Natalya Boeva and Polina Spirina trace the most subtle emotions and the most imperceptible color shifts of these treasures with utmost precision – a moving interpretation of an extraordinary program!

Insomnia is a persistent or recurrent sleeplessness. When we sleep fitfully or lie awake night after night, we conjure up all manner of images, fantasies and feelings, which in the hours of darkness or twilight mostly seem confused, larger than life and very existential. That is how it is with our choice of Lieder. The pieces examine the great feelings and issues like love, death, hate, yearning, under the magnifying glass of nocturnal sensitivity. Worlds arise in which one no longer knows what is true and what is not. And that is what is special about our Insomnia: everything is possible, and everything is to be found in the ears and the eyes of the listener.