Sunday, February 16, 2025
February 16, 2025

Opera-pianist phenom Fenlon comes home

By KIRSTEN BOLTON

For ARTSPRING 

After her creative residency last August at ArtSpring and the release of her much-anticipated, internationally acclaimed debut CD in October, the now Berlin-based Rachel Fenlon is returning home with a special concert Friday, Jan. 31. 

Her evocative performance of Franz Schubert’s 24-song poetic masterpiece Winterreise has been praised as the first of its kind in recording history, with good reason.

This U.K.-born, B.C.-raised UBC alum with a master’s degree in opera performance is proving to be a brazen young phenomenon with a double-talent: an opera singer who accompanies herself on piano, performing entirely from memory. Critics and reviewers from the BBC to OperaWire have been struck by the magnitude of this audacious feat.

Recordings by female singers of Schubert’s most haunting song cycle have been few and far between, yet Fenlon felt compelled to take on the challenge.

With the original composition completed just one year before the death of Schubert, who tragically succumbed to syphilis at the age of 31, Winterreise is a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller that describe the anguished wanderings of a grief-stricken young man, mourning a lost love.

This story of grief, death, loneliness and isolation took root with Fenlon, who, according to the notes accompanying her CD, bought her first score of Winterreise in the winter of Covid lockdowns in 2020 when she was living alone in a house at the foot of a forest outside of Berlin. 

Going days and sometimes weeks without seeing anyone, she spent two years learning the work methodically but also contemplating the themes of solitude, passionate love and loss as her own personal journey. The result is that despite the composer and Fenlon being 200 years apart, different genders in different times, the frequency and feeling of that haunting human story is the same, yet reinvented. 

Fenlon has performed her interpretation for audiences in Germany, Portugal, Ontario and Quebec, and is now coming home to the West Coast. While on Salt Spring, she’ll be sure to have a fan in the audience with her proud mother Tracy Watkins, who is a local resident, and other family and friends with whom she hikes and swims when she returns from overseas every summer.

“To watch Rachel perform this piece is incredibly moving,” said Watkins. “She interprets the work in a single 75-minute fluid cycle from memory, which allows her to lean in and play it with deep feeling and exceptional musicality. It’s such a natural, fluid, human approach that it opens itself up for wider audience appeal.”

Fenlon has performed as soprano soloist with orchestras such as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Victoria Symphony, the Northern Czech Philharmonic, Finnish Baroque Ensemble Nylandia, and the Vancouver Bach Choir, and appeared in leading roles with Pacific Opera, Bard on the Beach and at the Rossini Opera Festival.

Thank you to the Farran Foundation for supporting this performance, which begins at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets are available through ArtSpring, online and at the box office.

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