The Oxford International Song Festival has been running this kind of calculated risk for 25 years: pair a crowd-pleaser with something that will make half the room uncomfortable, and trust the performers to hold the room together. Benjamin Appl and James Baillieu's 'Lines of Life' programme was the festival's thesis statement made audible — Schubert lieder alongside György Kurtág's spiny miniatures, two repertoires whose audiences rarely overlap, in the oldest purpose-built concert room in the country. Appl's authority with Kurtág is not borrowed. He has worked directly with the composer — the kind of working relationship where a morning spent on the first line of a song ends with Kurtág suggesting you start again after lunch. That intimacy showed. The unaccompanied miniatures, which could easily register as academic exercises in the wrong hands, came across as intently concentrated rather than merely difficult. The Six Hölderlin-Gesänge set poetry that is genuinely gnomic before Kurtág adds rhythmic complexity on top; Appl absorbed the frenetic gasps and growls without letting them tip into caricature, and caught the moments where the melismatic writing opens into something unexpectedly beautiful. The Schubert selection was threaded on a single emotional wire — love, longing, loss — and Appl navigated the tonal variety without losing that thread. The nihilistic Totengräbers Heimweh brought out a brittle, sardonic quality that found its echo in the melancholy Schäfers Klagelied and even in the otherwise jaunty Die Taubenpost. These are not obvious pairings; Appl made the argument for them in real time. Baillieu is doing more than accompanying here. His dramatically astute reading of Viola — Schubert's song about a jilted violet, a piece that can turn cloying fast — drove the narrative forward rather than simply supporting the voice above it. Throughout the programme, his choices were structurally intelligent: knowing when to pull back, when to push, when to let silence do the work. The evening opened with young artists Ellen Mawhinney and Daniel Silcock in an aquatic-themed recital — 15 minutes covering Kishmul's Galley and Hamilton Harty's Sea Wrack — that served as a smart palate-setter. Mawhinney's powerful soprano and Silcock's poetic piano instincts were on display without overstaying the welcome. The curators understood that the opening slot should build appetite, not compete. Appl's voice occasionally didn't go precisely where he wanted it when pulling back to soften the tone — a small technical friction in an otherwise seamless evening. It's the kind of thing you notice because everything else is so controlled, not because it disrupts the listening experience. The programme's real achievement is the one that doesn't show its work: it made Kurtág feel inevitable next to Schubert, rather than confrontational. That is a harder trick than it sounds, and it required a performer with genuine investment in both worlds rather than someone performing crossover for festival points.
