Internationally renowned French baritone Ludovic Tézier will make his debut at the Opera House with popular song cycles by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Ibert. At the Stars' Recitals with Piano season-opening concert on 9 November 2025, he will be joined by the distinguished English pianist Julius Drake.
Ludovic Tézier is one of today’s most highly acclaimed baritones, a regular guest at the great opera houses of New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, and Vienna, as well as at the Salzburg and Aix-en-Provence Festivals. The singer from Marseille achieved his international breakthrough, like many others, through the Operalia Singing Competition founded by Plácido Domingo, where in 1998 he earned a distinguished placement alongside Erwin Schrott and Joyce DiDonato. Over the past three decades, he has become renowned primarily as an outstanding interpreter of Verdi roles, yet his wide-ranging repertoire spans from Mozart to Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Massenet, all the way to Puccini. Many of his memorable performances are preserved on dozens of CD and DVD recordings.
For his first appearance at the Hungarian State Opera, Tézier has assembled a program drawn from some of the most celebrated works of the art song repertoire, the genre that offers singers the most personal and expressive means of artistic self-revelation. The concert opens with Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love), composed in 1840 after the composer finally won the long battle with his future father-in-law to marry his beloved Clara Wieck. Set to sixteen poems by Heine, the cycle explores themes of fulfilled love, disappointment, sorrow, and dreams. After the intermission, Jacques Ibert’s Chansons de Don Quichotte will be performed. The 20th-century French composer wrote these four songs in 1933 for the Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film Don Quixote, for the legendary Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. The cycle, which often appears in baritone recitals, was most recently heard by the OPERA audiences last year in Erwin Schrott’s song recital. The evening concludes with Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, composed between 1857 and 1858 to five poems by his muse, Mathilde Wesendonck, before Wagner’s wife, Minna, discovered their six-year-long platonic relationship. A few weeks ago, these songs were heard at the Opera House in a symphonic arrangement performed by Andrea Szántó, but now, in their original version for voice and piano, Tézier’s masculine interpretation promises an entirely different artistic perspective.
Tézier’s partner for the evening will be the British pianist Julius Drake, professor at London’s Guildhall School of Music, and a frequent collaborator in song recitals at leading opera houses and music festivals across Europe and the United States. The Budapest audience last heard him a year ago accompanying Metropolitan Opera tenor Matthew Polenzani in recital. The award-winning pianist, who has made numerous acclaimed recordings, will not only be Tézier’s equal partner in the song cycles but will also perform two solo pieces from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, including the famous Duetto, which evokes the dialogue of two singing voices.
The season-opening concert of Stars' Recitals with Piano series is a worthy celebration of the art of song: the two world-class artists invite the audience on a truly romantic journey through love and sorrow, life and death, and the landscapes of dreams.
Photos by Gregor Hohenberg / Marco Borggreve
