Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms

"Spanish" verses of Emanuel von Geibel have inspired Robert Schumann's creation of the «Spanish songs » - a cycle belonging to the genre of Liederspiel, so named by Schumann who loved to experiment with the musical-dramatic form. It is a kind of synthesis of a traditional songs cycle (Liederkreis) and a national German genre Singspiel («singen» - to sing and «Spiel» – playing) where singing, dancing and dialogues follow each other consecutively. While having excluded all the external attributes of acting (scenery, costumes, dialogues) the composer resolves dramatic line exclusively by musical means...

Characters are presented by various types of voices, their relationships and development of the story by a mixed structure of ensembles (solo, duets, quartets). This way the traditional form of a performance (concert) is enriched by the theatrical-dramatic contents. One could say that Liederspiel is some kind of a Concert in act (or the Role Concert).

And exactly this particular genre is considered to be the «name-card» of the Moscow Choral Theatre of Boris Pevzner. The credo of the Theatre is seen – while based on a traditional manner of chamber singing with its emotional and psychological depth, tender and filigree furnishing of the details – in creating not only and not so much the traditional concert programs, but more of musical-dramatic performances whereby each character is not a faceless «voice from a chorus», but a unique creative individual entity, and the collective as a whole appears as a perfectly artistically assembled group of soloists-virtuosos.