Matthias Goerne opened Wigmore Hall's 125th-anniversary season with Schubert's Schwanengesang and B flat Sonata, with David Fray at the piano.
Matthias Goerne opened Wigmore Hall’s 125th-anniversary season on Tuesday 9 September 2025 with an evening of Schubert, joined at the piano by the French pianist David Fray.
Born in Weimar in 1967, Goerne studied voice in Leipzig and then took lessons from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom he counted as his idol, and later from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He made his professional debut in 1990 in Bach’s St Matthew Passion under Kurt Masur and reached the Salzburg Festival in 1997. His Schubert edition for Harmonia Mundi ran to twelve discs, completed in 2014, and he has recorded lieder for Deutsche Grammophon with Jan Lisiecki, Seong-Jin Cho and Daniil Trifonov. On the opera stage he sings Wagner and Strauss, including at the Royal Opera House.
Fray, born in Tarbes in 1981, came to notice as second grand prize winner at the Montreal International Music Competition in 2004, and his early recordings paired Schubert with Liszt and Bach with Boulez.
The first half gave the songs of Schwanengesang, with Herbst placed among them, in a hall of about 550 seats. After the interval Fray played the Piano Sonata in B flat, D960, the last sonata Schubert wrote. He composed both works in 1828, the year he died. The encores were Die Taubenpost, the fourteenth song of Schwanengesang, and the Andante from the G flat Impromptu, D899.