Lunch-concert – Schwanengesang

Alex Puhrer et Senka Brankovic - EPFL 2013

Thursday October 13th at 12 am
Salle Polyvalente EPFL

By Alexander Puhrer (voice)
and Senka Brankovic (piano)

Singer and EPFL alumni Alexander Puhrer comes back on the EPFL campus to sing “Schwanengesang” (Swan Song) by Franz Schubert. This posthumous collection holds fourteen lieders inspired by the poems of Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl.

The Schwanengesang lieders alternate between quiet and light (Frühlingssehnsucht, Die Taubenpost), dramatic (der Atlas), or even raving (Die Stadt, der Doppelgänger). Numerous themes are tackled by the poems : the world and nature, the hallucinatory wanderings of the character, nostalgia. The musical style is varied, from melancholia (Ihr Bild, Das Fischermädchen) to elegiac Ständchen, from dark quality (Aufenthalt, Der Atlas, Die Stadt) to the joyful and light tone of Abschied and wonderful Die Taubenpost, which ends the collection of poems and is often seen as Schubert’s last poem.

The musicians:
Before he began his studies at EPFL, Alexander Puhrer had already spent a decade as a professional classical singer. Born Austria, he grew up in Vienna and studied in the USA (at Gettysburg College and the Cincinnati College Conservatory for Music). In addition to the many roles he has interpreted on stage (Papageno, Don Giovanni, Graf Eberbach, Conte Almaviva, to cite just a few), under renowned directors of the likes of Philippe Jordan, Seiji Ozawa, Karel Chichon or Arnold Östmann, Alexander Puhrer is internationally recognized as a Lied performer. Alexander Puhrer graduated from EFPL/ETHZ in 2014 with a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering and now works for Alpiq as Head of Nuclear Assets in the Nuclear Power Generation department.

Austrian pianist Senka Brankovic studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the University for Music in Vienna. Her professors were Hans Leygraf, Hans Petermandl et Heinz Medjimorec, before going on to specialize in Liedbegleitung with David Lutz. She has received many distinctions and is a laureate of the famous Bösendorfer Wettbewerb in Vienna. In 2001, Alexander Puhrer and Senka Brankovic won the Internationaler Wettbewerb für Liedkunst in Stuttgart.

Admission free