LIEDER IN ENGLISH

In 2017, Chris founded a Lieder in English project to bring classical song to a wider audience, beginning by commissioning Jeremy Sams to create new singable translations of Schubert's song cycles.

The Fair Maid of the Mill (Nicky Spence and Toby Spence), Winter Journey (Roderick Williams), and Swansong (Sir John Tomlinson) have since been performed widely and recorded for Signum Records; and a fourth volume of Schubert songs (Roderick Williams and Rowan Pierce) was released in November 2023.

The project has been described by The Telegraph as ‘quietly daring yet superbly accomplished’, by The Guardian as ‘an unusually direct Lieder experience’, and by The Scotsman as having ‘done more to make music accessible than any number of Arts Council initiatives.’

With Jeremy Sams, Chris also created a new version of Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook­, staged and sung in English, which toured throughout the UK and was described by The Times as ‘an utterly and unexpectedly disarming experience’.

Roderick Williams and Chris also took Schubert’s Winter Journey on a nationwide schools tour introducing hundreds of children to Schubert, in association with Music in the Round.

Future projects will focus on songs of Schumann (including the song cycle Myrtles with newly commissioned poems by Kate Wakeling), Brahms, Mahler, Strauss and Wolf, as well as French songs.