Franz-Joseph Selig & Gerold Huber at La Monnaie

Despite the lovely repertoire that exists for the bass, you will not often hear that voice type at work in a recital. For this reason alone, the season’s last recital will be a special occasion. But if, on top of that, the name of that bass is Franz-Josef Selig, then you can certainly raise your expectations even higher … The renowned German lied singer prepared a sophisticated, literary programme spanning the nineteenth century: from the ‘Gothic’ ballads about kings, death and decay composed by Carl Loewe (who died exactly 150 years ago), via a number of rarely heard lieder by Hugo Wolf set to texts by Goethe, to the expressive protomodernism of Rudi Stephan, whose promising career ended abruptly in the trenches in 1915.