Louis Schwizgebel // Poems

Louis Schwizgebel // Poems

Client : Aparté

Réalisation : Guillaume L’hôte

Born in Geneva in 1987, Louis Schwizgebel won the Geneva International Music Competition at the age of seventeen, and two years later the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. He became internationally known to a wide audience in 2012 when he won second prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition. (‘In an ideal world he would have been placed joint first,’ wrote Tim Ashley in The Guardian.)
The magazine Le Temps had long predicted that ‘he will gain his place among the elite of the international scene’. Die Nordostschweiz described him as ‘in everything a visionary creator’, while The New York Times praised the brilliance of his playing.
There is no doubt that music lovers will appreciate the finesse of this young pianist and poet.

And it is to poetry that Louis Schwizgebel decided to dedicate his first album.
Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit was inspired by three of the prose-ballads of Aloysius Bertrand. Th pianist Alfred Cortot described this work as ‘one of the most astonishing examples of instrumental ingenuity ever manifested by the industry of composers’.
Louis Schwizgebel has also chosen Liszt’s transcriptions of three Schubert lieder: ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, reflecting the motion of the water, the rocking of a boat; the melancholy ‘Ständchen'; and the swirling and sinister ‘Erlkönig’, to Goethe’s famous poem.
Closer to the present day, Elis by Heinz Holliger was inspired by the works of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, with their pessimism and enigmatic symbolism.
The programme ends in a lighter vein, with ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, the heart and soul of the first (Swiss) book of Liszt’s three-part Années de Pèlerinage.

‘Poems’ by Louis Schwizgebel will appeal to all who appreciate the combination of music and poetry.

Director: Guillaume L’Hôte