Schubert concert with baritone Roderick Williams and the Carducci Quartet, performing the String Quartet No.10 in Eb Major and Die schöne Müllerin.
Roderick Williams and the Carducci Quartet play The Tung Auditorium on Wednesday 10 February 2027, as part of the Liverpool Philharmonic Chamber Music season. It's a double bill of Schubert: the String Quartet No. 10 in Eb Major and the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. The baritone takes the lead on the latter, with the quartet providing the accompaniment.
Die schöne Müllerin is one of Schubert's great cycles, and it's usually a pairing of voice and piano. Here, the piano part is taken over by the Carducci Quartet, so the songs are played by strings instead. It's a cycle that tells a story through a series of songs, and having a string quartet behind the voice changes the whole feel of it.
Williams is open about why he does it this way. He describes Schubert's piano writing in Die schöne Müllerin as "perfect, idiomatic, delightful" and says it doesn't need transcribing. But he points out that Schubert's affinity for string chamber and choral music often produces linear part-writing that invites scoring for instruments. For Williams, the decision to perform with chamber groups comes from a place of evangelism for the art song repertoire—a way of bringing this kind of music to a wider audience.
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That's the second half of the night. The first is the String Quartet No. 10 in Eb Major, a proper chamber piece for the quartet on their own. Together, the two make for a full evening of Schubert, from the quartet's instrumental work to the songs with Williams on voice. The concert starts at 19:30 at The Tung Auditorium, in the Yoko Ono Learning Centre on Oxford Street.
