Performers: Tim Parker-Langston, tenor and Genevieve Ellis, piano

Programme: Settings of Goethe’s two Wandrers Nachtlied poems by composers Fanny Hensel, Carl Loewe, Franz Liszt and Karl Friedrich Zelter. Spring songs by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf. Including three premiere performances of songs by Fanny Hensel. 

Biographies:

British pianist and conductor GENEVIEVE ELLIS is Assistant Chorus Master of the Royal Opera Chorus. Born in London, she was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College and the Centre for Young Musicians. She read music at Selwyn College,  Cambridge before going on to further training in accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music, and opera coaching at Flanders Opera Studio. During her time in Belgium she worked for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, the Opéra Royal de Wallonie and Collegium Vocale Ghent and completed a chamber music programme at the Orpheus Instituut, focusing on Benjamin Britten’s arrangements of Purcell songs. She worked for English National Opera as a trainee répétiteur and became Assistant Chorus Master with the company in 2012. She has been Guest Chorus Master at the Opera de Lyon (War Requiem, 2017) and with the BBC Singers (Prisoner of the State, January 2020). At the Royal Opera she has assisted Chorus Directors Renato Balsadonna and William Spaulding on over 60 titles and has been Chorus Master for Le nozze di Figaro, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Don Giovanni, and Innocence by Kaija Saariaho.  Ellis is also active as an accompanist and vocal coach and has performed extensively as a song recitalist in Belgium, Ireland and the UK. In 2023, she travelled to Leipzig with five other musicians to record HENSEL: LIEDER for First Hand Records.

TIM PARKER-LANGSTON sings tenor in the chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a post he has held for five years, alongside which he has continued solo singing in recital and concert projects, as well as covers for the ROH. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he discovered the songs of Fanny Hensel and since then, he has committed an enormous level of energy to uncovering, sharing and performing the music of the composer. In 2020, Parker-Langston began his PhD study into Hensel’s Lieder at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he is fast becoming an important voice in the field of Hensel's song repertoire. In Winter 2021, he published the open-access resource henselsongsonline.org ‒ a website that hosts free sheet music editions of the entire Lieder by Fanny Hensel (239 songs!). In Summer 2022, these songs were published in high voice keys as a three-volume printed collection. He has discovered much during his engagements with Hensel's Lieder, an exploration that is intertwined with the questions facing academia regarding how knowledge born out of doing can become a more central part of musicological discourse. The upcoming album release HENSEL: LIEDER (First Hand Records) forms another important step in Parker-Langston's proactive output, aiming to cultivate a better sense of what Hensel's Lieder are like for listeners and performers.