Michelangelo Visions

Jeremy Kleeman | bass-baritone

Jack Symonds | piano

3pm, Sunday 20 September
Wesley Music Centre
20 National Circuit, Forrest

Michelangelo Buonarotti is best known as a sculptor and painter, yet this Renaissance polymath was also a first-rate poet, writing sonnets of passionate intensity. This program is a hyper-examination of Michelangelo’s profound thoughts about art, mortality, love and faith through three different composers’ responses to his poetry.

Wolf is the most important late-Romantic German songwriter, yet hardly performed in Australia. His Michelangelo songs are his last major work, compressing a lifetime’s absorption of Wagnerian passion into an intense twelve minutes. Jack Symonds’s new work, the third in his 2026 Michelangelo triptych, begins with Michelangelo’s belief that a finished sculpture is already present in a block of stone and just needs to be ‘released’ from it. In a new translation and adaptation by director Sarah Giles, this song cycle composed especially for Jeremy Kleeman goes on to encompass the bleak and the visionary, as well as the humour of Michelangelo complaining of a bad back while painting the Sistine Chapel. Lastly, Shostakovich’s final major vocal work, written under the shadow of terminal illness, stares death in the face with characteristic intensity and asks nothing less than the meaning of existence.

Jeremy Kleeman and Jack Symonds have worked together for a decade performing operas of all kinds, with Kleeman recently assuming the title role in Symonds’s Gilgamesh to great acclaim.

Program: Hugo Wolf Michelangelo-Lieder; Jack Symonds In Stone (world premiere, commissioned by Opera Queensland); Dmitry Shostakovich Suite on Verses of Michelangelo, Op. 145.