Wolfgang Holzmair
Encyclopedia
Wolfgang Holzmair is an Austrian baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...

.

Holzmair studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He won 2nd prize in the baritone class of the 's-Hertogenbosch International Vocal Competition
's-Hertogenbosch International Vocal Competition
The International Vocal Competition ‘s-Hertogenbosch is a biannual singing competition held in the Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch. Next to the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition and the Charles Hennen Concours, it is the only other international classical music competition in the...

 in 1981, and a year later 1st prize in the Musikverein International Lied
Lied
is a German word literally meaning "song", usually used to describe romantic songs setting German poems of reasonably high literary aspirations, especially during the nineteenth century, beginning with Carl Loewe, Heinrich Marschner, and Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf...

er Competition, Vienna.

Opera

Holzmair spent about six years with opera companies in Bern (Bern Theatre) and Gelsenkirchen (Musiktheater im Revier
Musiktheater im Revier
Musiktheater im Revier is the venue for performing opera, operetta, musical theatre and ballet in Gelsenkirchen, Germany...

) before successes in Udo Zimmermann
Udo Zimmermann
Udo Zimmermann was born in Dresden on October 6, 1943. He is a German composer, music director, and conductor.- Biography :Zimmermann was a member of the Dresdner Kreuzchor from 1954 to 1962. He then continued his music education at the Dresden Music School. He studied composition with Johannes...

's The White Rose
Weiße Rose (opera)
Weiße Rose The title of the opera is often shown as Die Weiße Rose; however, the publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, shows both versions as .is a chamber opera in one act by composer Udo Zimmermann...

and Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

's Pelléas et Mélisande
Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)
Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. The French libretto was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande...

brought him to general attention His repertoire includes rarely performed works such as Henze
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...

's Boulevard Solitude
Boulevard Solitude
Boulevard Solitutde is a Lyrisches Drama or opera in one act by Hans Werner Henze to a German libretto by Grete Weil after the play by Walter Jockisch, in its turn a modern telling of François Prévost's Manon Lescaut. The premiere was on February 17, 1952 at the Landestheater, Hanover...

, Nigel Osborne’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union
The Electrification of the Soviet Union
The Electrification of the Soviet Union is an opera in two acts by Nigel Osborne. The libretto was written by Craig Raine and based on The Last Summer and Spectorsky, two semi-autobiographical works by Boris Pasternak who appears as a narrator in the opera...

, Hindemith
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...

's Neues vom Tage
Neues vom Tage
Neues vom Tage is an opera in three parts by Paul Hindemith, with a German libretto by Marcellus Schiffer....

and Poulenc
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...

's Les mamelles de Tirésias
Les mamelles de Tirésias
Les mamelles de Tirésias is a surrealist two-act opéra bouffe by Francis Poulenc, based on the play of the same title by Guillaume Apollinaire, which was written in 1903 but first performed in 1917...

.

More standard works include Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...

's Capriccio
Capriccio (opera)
Capriccio is the final opera by German composer Richard Strauss, subtitled "A Conversation Piece for Music". The opera received its premiere performance at the Nationaltheater München on October 28, 1942. Clemens Krauss and Strauss himself wrote the German libretto...

(the Count), Ariadne auf Naxos
Ariadne auf Naxos
Ariadne auf Naxos is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Bringing together slapstick comedy and consuming beautiful music, the opera's theme is the competition between high and low art for the public's attention.- First version :The opera was originally...

(Harlequin and the Music Master), Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac...

(Faninal); Mozart's The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....

(Papageno and the Speaker) and Così fan tutte
Così fan tutte
Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti K. 588, is an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed in 1790. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte....

(Guglielmo and Don Alfonso); Wagner's Tannhäuser
Tannhäuser (opera)
Tannhäuser is an opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on the two German legends of Tannhäuser and the song contest at Wartburg...

(Wolfram), and Meistersinger
Meistersinger
A Meistersinger was a member of a German guild for lyric poetry, composition and unaccompanied art song of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. The Meistersingers were drawn from middle class males for the most part.-Guilds:...

(Beckmesser). In the 2009/2010 season he sang Demetrius in the Canadian Opera Company
Canadian Opera Company
The Canadian Opera Company is an opera company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest opera company in Canada and the third largest producer of opera in North America. The COC performs in its own opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.-History:For 40 years until...

's production of Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

's A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream (opera)
A Midsummer Night's Dream is an opera with music by Benjamin Britten and set to a libretto adapted by the composer and Peter Pears from William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream...

, the Father in Humperdinck
Engelbert Humperdinck
Engelbert Humperdinck was a German composer, best known for his opera, Hänsel und Gretel. Humperdinck was born at Siegburg in the Rhine Province; at the age of 67 he died in Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.-Life:After receiving piano lessons, Humperdinck produced his first composition...

's Hänsel und Gretel on a tour in Japan, and the Sorceress in a concert performance of Purcell
Purcell
Henry Purcell was an English composer.Purcell may also refer to:*Purcell, Indiana, an unincorporated community in Johnson Township, Knox County, Indiana*Purcell, Missouri, a city in Jasper County, Missouri, United States...

's Dido and Aeneas
Dido and Aeneas
Dido and Aeneas is an opera in a prologue and three acts by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell to a libretto by Nahum Tate. The first known performance was at Josias Priest's girls' school in London no later than the summer of 1688. The story is based on Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid...

in Vienna

Song recital and orchestral concerts

Holzmair's high, rather light. timbre is particularly suitable for song and in 1989 a highly successful debut at the Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall is a leading international recital venue that specialises in hosting performances of chamber music and is best known for classical recitals of piano, song and instrumental music. It is located at 36 Wigmore Street, London, UK and was built to provide London with a venue that was both...

 launched his international recital career. His clear and expressive language embedded in a pure legato line, and his dramatic commitment, have been especially commended. The English music critic Alan Blyth was immediately struck by the baritone’s first recording of Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin
Die schöne Müllerin
Die schöne Müllerin , is a song cycle by Franz Schubert on poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the earliest extended song cycle to be widely performed. The work is considered one of Schubert's most important, and it is widely performed and recorded....

and remained a firm advocate; more recently Richard Fairman referred to an exceptional ability to communicate the rhythms and meanings of poetry.

He has worked with many pianists of note, a long-standing collaboration with Imogen Cooper
Imogen Cooper
Imogen Cooper, CBE is an English pianist.Born in London, she is the daughter of the musicologist Martin Cooper. She studied piano in London with Kathleen Long, in Paris with Jacques Février and Yvonne Lefébure, and in Vienna with Alfred Brendel, Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda...

 being widely admired for its exceptionally close rapport; other partners include Andreas Haefliger
Andreas Haefliger
Andreas Haefliger is a German-born Swiss pianist.Haefliger was born into a musical family, as the son of famed tenor, Ernst Haefliger. He grew up in Switzerland and later studied at The Juilliard School...

and Philippe Cassard as well as dedicated accompanyists Gerard Wyss, Russell Ryan and Roger Vignoles
Roger Vignoles
Roger Vignoles is a British pianist and accompanist. He regularly performs with the world’s leading singers – including Kiri Te Kanawa, Thomas Allen, Anne Sofie von Otter, Thomas Hampson, Gitta-Maria Sjøberg, Sarah Walker, Susan Graham, Felicity Lott, Stephan Genz, Monica Groop, Wolfgang Holzmair,...

. He also maintains a strong presence in the world of chamber music, where the Trio Wanderer
Trio Wanderer
Trio Wanderer is a piano trio formed by three french musicians at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique. They studied with such masters as Menahem Pressler from the Beaux Arts Trio, and the Amadeus Quartet. They won numerous prizes such as the ARD Competition in Munich and the...

, the Nash Ensemble
Nash Ensemble
The Nash Ensemble of London is an acclaimed English chamber ensemble. It was founded by Artistic Director Amelia Freedman in 1964, while she was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, and was named after the Nash Terraces around the Academy...

 and the Rachmaninov Trio are among his collaborators.
Holzmair regularly appears in major centres in Europe and North America, and also travels to outlying venues where communities have fewer opportunities to hear live recitals. Recent European Music Festivals include Risør
Risør
is a city and municipality in Aust-Agder county, Norway. The city belongs to the traditional region of Sørlandet. It is a popular tourist place. The surrounding area includes many small lakes and hills, and is known for its beautiful coastline as well....

, Kuhmo
Kuhmo
Kuhmo is a town and a municipality in Finland and is part of the Kainuu region. The municipality has a population of and covers an area of of which is water. The population density is . It has a borderline of with Russia....

, Lockenhaus
Lockenhaus
Lockenhaus is a town in the district of Oberpullendorf in Burgenland in Austria.- History :The town was part of Hungary since the foundation of the kingdom in the year 1000. Since 1898 the name Léka had to be used because of the Magyarization by the government in Budapest...

, Kyburgiade, the Oxford Lieder Festival
Oxford Lieder Festival
The Oxford Lieder Festival, founded in 2001 by Sholto Kynoch, is the United Kingdom's largest art song festival. Oxford Lieder is now a registered charity and in addition to the annual festival which is usually in October, there are regular Song Evenings throughout the year, and a growing programme...

 and Styriarte, and he has also participated in La Folle Journée
La Folle Journée
La Folle Journée is a French annual classical music festival held in Nantes. It is the largest classical music festival in France. The festival's name refers to the Pierre Beaumarchais play The Marriage of Figaro, whose alternative title is La Folle Journée .René Martin founded the La Folle...

's program for bringing classical music to new audiences. In 2010 Holzmair and the Departure Centre for Creative Design in Vienna collaborated in a bid to attract new listeners to lieder, by presenting concerts in which the baritone and 6 compatriots performed Wolf against visual backdrops. The experiment was deemed a success, and was repeated for Mahler’s lieder, with a slightly different cast of singers, in 2011. The Wolf series is now available on 5 DVDs (which use studio recordings, so that the viewer sees the visuals but not the singers).

Holzmair's wide-ranging repertoire includes melodies as well as lieder and extends from the 19th to the 21st century. He has long been committed to bringing to attention the "Entartete" composers who suffered under the Nazi regime and has recorded lieder by Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer.-Family background:Eisler was born in Leipzig where his Jewish father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy...

, Franz Mittler
Franz Mittler
Franz Mittler was an Austrian composer, musician, and humorist.-Life and work:...

, Erich Zeisl
Erich Zeisl
Erich Zeisl was an Austrian-born Jewish American composer.-Life and music:Born to a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, Zeisl's musical precocity enabled him to gain a place at the Vienna State Academy when he was 14, at which age his first song was published...

, Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek was an Austrian of Czech origin and, from 1945, American composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music...

, Franz Schreker
Franz Schreker
Franz Schreker was an Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, his style is characterized by aesthetic plurality , timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and...

and composers from Theresienstadt; in 2010 he joined the Nash Ensemble in a week-end show-casing music by the Theresienstadt composers, at the Wigmore Hall.

He has performed orchestrated lieder with many leading orchestras, as in the 2010 Styriarte Festival; other recent orchestral appearances have been in Britten's War Requiem
War Requiem
The War Requiem, Op. 66 is a large-scale, non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed January 1962. Interspersed with the traditional Latin texts, in telling juxtaposition, are settings of Wilfred Owen poems...

, Brahms' Deutsches Requiem, Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...

's Les Choephores and Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

's Scenes from Faust.

Song premieres and commissions

Premieres since 2000 include Kurt Schwertsik
Kurt Schwertsik
Kurt Schwertsik is an Austrian contemporary composer. He is famous for creating the “Third Viennese School” and spreading contemporary classical music....

's Die Welt eine Laute and Fioretti per San Francesco, a chamber version of Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...

's Five Neapolitan Songs with the Nash Ensemble (as part of a 75th birthday tribute to the composer), Dmitry Smirnov's Eternal Refuge with the Altenburg Trio Wien (recorded by Austrian Radio), Daniel Schnyder's one-act opera Mozart and Casanova (at the Menuhin Festival, Gstaad
Gstaad
Gstaad is a village in the German-speaking section of the Canton of Berne in southwestern Switzerland. Part of the municipality of Saanen, Gstaad is known as one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the world....

), Helmut Schmidinger's solo cantata Mozart Briefe (with the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz, as part of Mozart's 250th), and David Matthews
David Matthews (composer)
David Matthews is an English composer of mainly orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works.- Life :He was born in London into a family that was 'not especially' musical; the desire to compose did not manifest itself until he was sixteen, and for a time he and his younger brother Colin Matthews,...

' arrangements of Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...

' lieder and of part of Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...

's Schwanengesang
Schwanengesang
Schwanengesang is the title of a posthumous collection of songs by Franz Schubert.Unlike the earlier Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, it uses poems by three poets, Ludwig Rellstab , Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl . Schwanengesang has the number D 957 in the Deutsch catalogue...

(commissioned by the Nash Ensemble); recent additions are Schmidinger's Wo der Bartl den Most holtand the Austrian premiere of Lori Laitman
Lori Laitman
Lori Laitman is one of America's most prolific and widely performed composers of vocal music. She has composed two operas, an oratorio, choral works and over 200 songs, setting the words of classical and contemporary poets, among them the lost voices of poets who perished in the Holocaust...

's Seed of Dreams. HIs Erich Zeisl disc marking the composer's 100th anniversary included unpublished songs, and he contributed to a recording of new settings of Eduard Mörike
Eduard Mörike
Eduard Friedrich Mörike was a German Romantic poet.-Biography:Mörike was born in Ludwigsburg. His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike , a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer...

's poetrycommissioned by the Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in...

 Instititute of Stuttgart, to celebrate the poet's 200th birthday. Holzmair has commissioned David Leisner
David Leisner
David Leisner is a classical guitarist, composer, teacher at the Manhattan School of Music and one of the leading authorities on focal dystonia, due to being impaired by the injury for 12 years and recovering through methods that he developed and now teaches his students.-Biography:David Leisner...

 to compose a new piece for baritone and string quartetand the resulting work, A Timeless Procession, will be premiered in a future season.

Teaching

Since 1998 Holzmair has taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum and given master class
Master class
A master class is a class given to students of a particular discipline by an expert of that discipline—usually music, but also painting, drama, or any of the arts....

es in Europe and North America; 2011 finds him participating in the annual Schubert Institute Master Course in BadenBaden for the 7th time. In 2008 the Royal College of Music
Royal College of Music
The Royal College of Music is a conservatoire founded by Royal Charter in 1882, located in South Kensington, London, England.-Background:The first director was Sir George Grove and he was followed by Sir Hubert Parry...

 made him a Fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 in recognition of services to the college and to music, and in 2009 he was a juror for the Wigmore Hall Song competition. He is an advisor to the Lotte Lehmann Foundation
Lotte Lehmann Foundation
The Lotte Lehmann Foundation, named for the great German soprano active in the first half of the 20th century, serves to preserve and perpetuate her legacy, and to honor her dream of bringing art song into the lives of as many people as possible....

, and contributed to the foundation's first CD.

Selected recordings

  • Schubert Die schöne Müllerin with Jörg Demus
    Jörg Demus
    Jörg Demus is an Austrian pianist.At the age of six, Demus received his first piano lessons. Five years later, at the age of 11, he entered the Vienna Academy of Music, studying piano and conducting. He graduated in 1945, then 17 years old...

    , 1983 Preiser
  • Ein deutsches Requiem with Herbert Blomstedt
    Herbert Blomstedt
    Herbert Blomstedt is a Swedish conductor.Herbert Blomstedt was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and two years after his birth, his Swedish parents moved the family back to their country of origin...

    , 1996 Decca Grammy Award
    Grammy Award
    A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...

  • Brahms Die Schone Magelone with Gerard Wyss and Will Quadfleg, 1986 Tudor
  • Braunfels Die Vögel with Lothar Zagrosek, 1992 Decca
  • Schubert lieder to texts by Mayrhofer with Gerard Wyss, 1993 Tudor
  • Schumann Heine
    Heinrich Heine
    Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was one of the most significant German poets of the 19th century. He was also a journalist, essayist, and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann...

     Lieder
    with Imogen Cooper, 1996 Philips
  • Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart Lieder with Imogen Cooper, 2000 Philips
  • Krenek and Schubert Lieder with Russell Ryan, 2003 Orf
  • Beethoven, Pleyel, Haydn, Songs from the British Isles with the Trio Wanderer, 2008 Cypres
  • Wolf Songs with Imogen Cooper, 2009 Wigmore Live
  • Songs from Theresienstadt with Russell Ryan, 2009 Bridge
  • Ravel Melodies and Trio with Ensemble Musique Oblique, 2009 Alphee

External links

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