Soprano Rachel Fenlon brings Schubert (and Daniel Janke) from Berlin to Whitehorse
Schubert was such a pioneer in the form that we now call art songs
When multi-faceted Yukon musician Daniel Janke was seeking a female vocalist for a project he was working on about three years ago, he approached a soprano with a “unique, refreshing” approach to singing opera.
Unfortunately, Rachel Fenlon wasn’t available at the time. But not long after, Janke was working on an opera in Berlin, where Fenlon happened to live. He sent her some samples from a cycle of art songs he was composing. The rest, as they say, was kismet.
On February 5, Fenlon will perform three of Janke’s songs at the Yukon Arts Centre (YAC) as part of the 2024-2025 Whitehorse Concerts season. Later this spring, Centrediscs, the record label of the Canadian Music Centre, will be releasing her album of Janke’s complete song cycle.
The main item on the Whitehorse Concerts menu, however, will be Fenlon’s presentation of die Winterreise, one of the all-time masterworks in the genre known in German as lied (plural, lieder).
Austrian composer Franz Schubert based the 24-song cycle for voice and piano on texts by minor German poet Willhelm Müller. It was published in 1828, a few months before Schubert’s death at the age of 31.
The cycle is linked thematically by the narrative of a young, rejected lover who leaves his home in the middle of the night, seeking solace and, if possible, meaning in a life of isolation and loneliness.
His journey takes him to a charcoal burner’s hut, a village, and a cemetery. Along the way, he renounces his faith and encounters both ominous ravens and a derelict musician, to whom he poses the question, “Shall I go with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy as I sing my songs?” just before the cycle ends.
“Schubert was such a pioneer in the form that we now call art songs,” Fenelon says. Despite being dead for just shy of 200 years, she adds, “There’s something about Schubert that feels contemporary.”
Fenlon’s visit to Whitehorse is part of an extensive tour that begins January 21 on Saltspring Island. Besides being the subject of an album that came out last September, die Winterreise has been at the core of her concert repertoire for more than a year.
“I feel that it’s always changing. The beautiful part about performing live is that you’re living with the music, and often it reveals itself to you in different ways every night.”
Her favourite pieces in the cycle may vary from time to time, but Fenelon admits a fondness for Number 7, Auf dem Flusse (On the River). She also loves the final four lieder, especially the last, der Leiermann (The Hurdy-gurdy Player), which she terms “extremely effective and haunting.”
This shift in preferences may come from the connection with a particular audience (“We’re inside something special.”), or “because I understand the character of what I’m saying in a different way.”
During a recent concert in Brazil, for example, one of the most “unassuming” pieces in the 70-minute cycle suddenly revealed itself in a new light.
“The incredible thing about masterworks, like Winterreise, or Shakespeare, is that different aspects can come alive onstage, in the moment.”
Besides being a classically-trained opera singer with a lyric soprano voice that Janke considers “beautiful,” Fenlon also accompanies herself on the piano, something not very common on the concert stage.
Just as any soloist and accompanist can sometimes clash due to a sudden shift in tempo, or volume, or a fluffed entry, Fenelon admits that the relationship between Rachel the singer and Rachel the accompanist can sometimes get a little testy.
“Totally. Absolutely, they can,” she laughs. One time recently, she admits, she found herself frustrated when the piano’s pace made her drag her voice down and sing really slowly.
“‘Rachel, don’t slow down so much. You won’t make it through that verse,’ she cautioned herself silently. So, it’s a constant.”
Fenelon’s Whitehorse performance will open with three of Janke’s songs, although she hasn’t told him which ones. Later, he says, she’ll be touring with the full cycle. Unlike the Schubert work, the songs in this as-yet-unnamed collection will be in English, not German.
It took Janke two or three years to finish the cycle, whose overall theme is different aspects of love, such as parental love, or brotherly love, he explains. “Triangulating in on those, trying to understand the big picture. Trying to get at the notion of whether or not we actually experience love in our lives.”
Along the way, Janke discovered that he’s good at writing songs.
“I enjoy it. It’s like a paperback novel; you connect a certain narrative and just write to it.”
While some of the songs are modernist, or have a modernist sound to them, “they’re not necessarily atonal,” Janke says.
“They’re not traditional lieder at all. They’re more modern songs. They have a lot of folk song elements to them. I borrowed a lot from folk songs; they had a big influence on me.”
As for Fenlon, the B.C.-raised lyric soprano thinks of herself as “sort of a singer-songwriter more than a traditional recitalist.”
Berlin has been her home for the past 10 years, but she comes back to Canada as much as she can. While she considers herself a country girl at heart, she says the German capital has helped her expand her view and her imagination.
“Berlin is one of the great cities with regard to culture,” she says. “It’s just a fantastic city. It’s sort of a rite of passage as a musician.
Fenlon’s Whitehorse Concerts recital at the YAC begins at 7 pm on Wednesday, February 5.
