Classical Music

Tuesday’s Wigmore programme has changed since it was first announced. ‘For the first time here it’s up to me – my choice of programme!’ The original Austro-German progress from Schubert to Berg, he decided, was ‘too intellectual to get warm. Singing it through, feeling it through, made me change my mind.’ He decided that the contrasts between the Romantic Vienna school and the Second Viennese School of the 1910s and ’20s would be better illustrated by one composer of each school: Brahms and Webern. Schoenberg and Berg have disappeared; so, sadly (and not just for the Guardian), has Schubert. A compensation is the presence of a composer unknown in Britain, Robert Gund. Feature continues

Who? Henschel burns with missionary zeal. Born a year after Richard Strauss (1865), Gund was ‘very, very popular in the first half of the twentieth century. He came from Leipzig to Vienna and his works had hundreds of performances. Nobody knows him now,’ a fact Henschel attributes to his mystifying absence from both Grove and its massive German equivalent, the formidable ‘Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart’: ‘He’s still in an old edition but he’s since been cut out.’ Henschel recently sang Gund in Vienna and was moved and excited to find the composer’s granddaughter in the audience, herself amazed at this new interest. The baritone hopes Gund’s songs will be a revelation. ‘He’s between Brahms, Mahler and Wolf. Very fascinating, fantastic music, close to the poetry he set. One of the great Lieder composers of his epoch.’ Fantastic music, acoustic and atmosphere too? That’s connecting.

Dietrich Henschel sings Brahms, Webern and Gund at the Wigmore Hall (Tuesday).