Mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska and pianist Jonathan Biss give an all-Schubert recital at Wigmore Hall on Thursday 17 September 2026.
Ema Nikolovska was born in Skopje, raised in Toronto and lives in Berlin, and she trained as a violinist before she trained as a singer — at the Glenn Gould School first, then Guildhall and the opera studio of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. The mezzo career since has been deliberately unbounded: Neuwirth, Saariaho and Boulez one week, Rameau or Jacquet de la Guerre the next, on the stated principle that every century of writing is inside every other one. She was a new-generation artist for three years, has been Wigmore Hall’s artist in residence, and took the Borletti-Buitoni Trust award in 2022.
Jonathan Biss was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1980 to two violinists, teaches, writes, and runs the Marlboro festival jointly with Mitsuko Uchida. He is one of the small number of pianists who treat accompanying a singer as a first-class occupation rather than a favour. He has recorded all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas and written two books about doing it.
They give the whole of Thursday 17 September 2026 at Wigmore Hall to Schubert. The first half gathers early songs and ends on the ‘Leichenfantasie’; the second takes ‘Schwanengesang’ apart, scattering ‘Die Stadt’, ‘Ihr Bild’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’ among other late songs. It closes on ‘Abschied von der Erde’, a deathbed scene, rather than on the ‘Doppelgänger’ that would be the obvious end.