London Song Festival

Richard and Pauline Strauss

Pianist Nigel Foster's London Song Festival starts its autumn run on 21 October 2014 when he is joined by soprano Ailish Tynan and baritone Simon Wallfisch for Music of a Foreign Land. The festival this year takes place at Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, London NW3 1NG and runs until 27 November with concerts marking the anniversaries of Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx and Isaac Nathan.

In Music of Foreign Land in 21 October, Tynan, Wallfisch and Foster will be performing songs inspired by foreign countries with music by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Hahn and Ravel, along with Bantock, Holst and Howells plus settings of Byron by the Anglo-Australian composer Isaac Nathan (1790-1864). In fact for Nathan's Hebrew Melodies it was the composer who persuaded Lord Byron to provide words to use for Nathan's arrangements of tunes used in synagogue services.

On 30 October, soprano Ilona Domnich will be performing Richard Strauss's Brentano Lieder along with music by Russian composer and poet Alexander Blok (1880-1921), Vicktor Ullman (1898-1944) the Austrian composer who died in Auschwitx and the young composer Michael Csanyi-Wills.

Soprano Regina Nathan and Foster will be re-creating a recital that Richard Strauss gave in 1903 with his wife Pauline de Ahna, and Jacqueline Straubinger-Bremar will talk about her father's friendship with the composer (11 /11). Then on 18 November the music of the Austrian composer Joseph Marx (1882-1964) will be explored as Sinead O'Kelly and Dominic Sedgwick join Foster to perform Marx's Italienisches Liederbuch, plus music by Schumann and Strauss.  The final recital in the series, Entartete Musick, is on 27 November when Foster and baritone Peter Braithwaite perform a music linked to the 1938 Nazi exhibition of degenerate art, with music by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eister.

Distinguished tenor Ian Partridge will be giving a masterclass on 8 November 2014.