A song cycle for voice and piano

STEVEN
SONDELLS  
tenor

LEWIS
KESTERTON
piano

Lewis Kesterton is a classical pianist, teacher, and writer based in London. Following an ambition to become a musician from an early age, he commenced his formal education in 2015 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire under the guidance of Mark Bebbington and Katharine Lam. Since then, he has studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire under the tutelage of Penelope Roskell, at the Royal College of Music with Mengyang Pan and City, University of London with Laura Roberts. In 2019, he was selected as the recipient of the John Ireland Trust Piano Prize, as well as being awarded second prize in the London College of Music’s Mona Blackman Competition. Lewis often performs around the capital as a soloist, chamber musician and accompanist, and is in high demand as a teacher.

Lewis embarked upon his career as a teacher in 2016. He has since developed his own unique and highly effective pedagogical techniques and has studied music education extensively. He has taught in private music schools across the country, worked for music services, and runs a thriving private teaching practice focusing on adult learners and advanced young pianists in his studio in West London. Over the years he has delivered numerous masterclasses and facilitated discussion groups for teachers. He is currently the Head of Piano at the The City Literary Institute and on the teaching faculty of Morley College, London's two specialist adult colleges, and is also a piano tutor in the Junior department at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Lewis has a particular interest in working with students overcoming injuries and has a passion for helping nurture innovative 21st-century musicians, and in 2023 was appointed as a Trustee of EPTA UK. 

Away from the piano, Lewis finds great enjoyment in singing, notably taking part in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast of Verdi’s Requiem in 2016, and being a member of the Hallé choir in their 2017-18 season. 

Steven Swindells is a British tenor, pianist, and music educator based in Aberystwyth, Wales. He is Founder and Director of AberMusic, where he maintains a teaching studio across voice, piano, musicianship, and theory.

Steven teaches across classical, musical theatre, and contemporary repertoire, with particular emphasis on healthy vocal technique, diction coaching in English, Italian, German, French, Latin, and Welsh, and integrating musicianship with performance through collaborative piano coaching. His students have progressed to leading UK institutions including Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, Urdang Academy, the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

As a performer, he has undertaken roles with British Youth Opera in London’s West End and as a tenor soloist in major works including Verdi’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Mozart’s Requiem. He is also an experienced collaborative pianist and vocal coach, working from the keyboard across multilingual repertoire.

He holds a Master of Performance in Voice & Graduate Diploma in Voice from the Royal College of Music and a BMus (Hons) in Piano Performance from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

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Winterreise (Winter Journey) a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert written in 1828, is a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller.  It is the second of Schubert's two song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müller (The Fair Maid of the Mill) in 1823.

Both were originally written for tenor voice but are frequently transposed to other vocal ranges, a precedent set by Schubert himself. The two works pose interpretative demands on listeners and performers due to their scale and structural coherence. Although Ludwig van Beethoven's cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) was published earlier, in 1816, Schubert's cycles hold the foremost place in the genre's history.

The cycle consists of a monodrama from the point of view of the wandering protagonist, in which concrete plot is somewhat ambiguous. After his beloved falls for another, the grief-stricken young man steals away from town at night and follows the river and steep ways to a charcoal burner's hut, where he rests before moving on. He comes across a village, passes a crossroads, and arrives at a cemetery. Here being denied even the death on which he has become fixated, he defiantly renounces faith before reaching a point of resignation. Finally he encounters a derelict street musician, the only instance in the cycle in which another character is present. The mysterious and ominous nature of the musician, along with the question posed in the last lines, leave the fate of the wanderer open to interpretation.

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