Art Song Canberra - Michelangelo Visions
Sun, 20 Sept
|Wesley Music Centre
Michelangelo Buonarotti is best known as a sculptor and painter, yet this Renaissance polymath was also a first-rate poet, writing sonnets of passionate intensity. Welcoming Jeremy Kleeman (bass-baritone) and Jack Symonds (piano) to the stage, who have worked together for a decade performing operas.
Time & Location
20 Sept 2026, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Wesley Music Centre, 20-22 National Circuit, Entrance via, Fitzroy St, Forrest ACT 2603, Australia
About the event
Jeremy Kleeman | bass-baritone
Jack Symonds | piano
Michelangelo Buonarotti is best known as a sculptor and painter, yet this Renaissance polymath was also a first-rate poet, writing sonnets of passionate intensity. This program is a hyper-examination of Michelangelo’s profound thoughts about art, mortality, love and faith through three different composers’ responses to his poetry.
Wolf is the most important late-Romantic German songwriter, yet hardly performed in Australia. His Michelangelo songs are his last major work, compressing a lifetime’s absorption of Wagnerian passion into an intense twelve minutes. Jack Symonds’s new work, the third in his 2026 Michelangelo triptych, begins with Michelangelo’s belief that a finished sculpture is already present in a block of stone and just needs to be ‘released’ from it. In a new translation and adaptation by director Sarah Giles, this song cycle composed especially for Jeremy Kleeman goes on to encompass the bleak and the visionary, as well…