Robin Tritschler made his Australian recital debut at UKARIA in 2024 with Olli Mustonen. He is well known on the world’s concert stages from London’s Wigmore Hall to the Seol Arts Centre, and he has sung and recorded with leading orchestras including Ensemble Pygmalion directed by Raphaël Pichon. He is joined here by the Argentinian-born, Melbourne-based pianist Andrea Katz, a prolific recitalist performing with prominent vocalists and instrumentalists including violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and singers Yvonne Kenny, Peter Coleman-Wright and Emma Matthews.

Tritschler has curated this program around the poetry of Heinrich Heine. Testament to Heine’s fame in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are many English, French and Russian songs using translations of his verse that sit alongside the scores of German Lieder. Tritschler’s choices honour that multilingual legacy with songs inspired by sweet seductions and pastoral fancies. The concert culminates with Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe (The Poet’s Love) in which he set sixteen of Heine’s poems from the Book of Songs. Schumann’s selections emphasise the narrator’s tragic story, but he hoped his musical settings might help ‘lift that mask so that wild tears may be transformed into pearls.’