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Tuesday 2 December 2008

In tune with poetry

Henrietta Bredin talks to Ian Bostridge about his passion for Lieder and his plans for the future

On an eye-wateringly bright and freezing cold day, Ian Bostridge contrives to look svelte and leggily elegant despite the fact that he confesses to wearing a thick layer of thermal underwear next to the skin. As soon as I have divested myself of some of the rather more haphazard layers I have adopted and can once more put my arms down by my sides, we warm up with large cups of coffee and talk about Homeward Bound, the celebratory season of work chosen and performed by Bostridge at the Barbican Centre in London.

‘It’s a wonderful opportunity, partly because it goes on for such a long time. The span of it, from December 2007 right through to December 2008, means that I can reflect all sorts of different aspects of music that I’m interested in. It begins and ends with Benjamin Britten, which I’m very happy about.’ In between Britten’s Billy Budd, which opened the season, and the Saint Nicolas cantata, which closes it, will be three other composers whose music has long preoccupied Bostridge — Schubert, Bach and Mozart — along with, more surprisingly, a late-night cabaret evening of songs by Kurt Weill and Noël Coward.

‘I love programming, both for recitals and for recordings. It’s a matter of being in tune, with the composer concerned and with your performing collaborator. Things can suddenly fall into place quite unexpectedly. I’d been working on a series of Schubert recordings with Leif Ove Andsnes where we mix songs with solo piano pieces and he told me that he was thinking of playing some fragments of piano works for the next recording and were there any fragments of songs? I said yes there were, but they probably wouldn’t be very good. But of course he’d set me thinking and I just happened to find some fragments of songs that were really interesting and fitted brilliantly with the pieces Leif wanted to play. So that was fantastic good luck but only happened because we’re on the same wavelength.

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