Self-accompanying soprano Rachel Fenlon marks her Vancouver Recital Society debut with Schubert’s Winterreise
UBC Opera alum has been gaining international acclaim for her immersive interpretations and double talent
Rachel Fenlon. Photo by Clara Evens
The Vancouver Recital Society presents Rachel Fenlon at the Vancouver Playhouse on September 8 at 3 pm
RACHEL FENLON IS having a bit of a pinch-me moment. The rising B.C.-raised soprano and pianist, who is gaining international notice with her self-accompanied performances, will make her Vancouver Recital Society debut on September 8 with Franz Schubert’s poignant song cycle, Winterreise—a milestone that she’s still getting her head around.
“The very first concert I went to at VRS was sung by [Canadian bass-baritone] Gerald Finley,” the Berlin-based Fenlon tells Stir in a Zoom call from her mother’s home on Salt Spring Island. “It’s a total full-circle moment that, on the one hand, you believe and trust will happen, but you also can’t quite believe that it’s happening, you know?”
Finley’s performance left an indelible impression on the young artist, who holds a master’s degree in opera performance from UBC. “It was the first time I heard the piece, and I was floored,” she recalls. “I’d always thought Winterreise was a male song cycle, so I had left it to my male colleagues at university….Hearing Gerald Finley interpret it? Oh my gosh. He took us into a transcendent place and I felt everything….I remember afterwards feeling like, ‘Oh, this is not a male thing at all. It’s just a human cycle.’”
Completed just one year before the composer’s death (he succumbed to syphilis at the tragically young age of 31), Winterreise is a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller that describe the anguished wanderings of a grief-stricken young man, mourning a lost love. “It’s a story of grief and death and loneliness, isolation, nature, love,” says Fenlon, who finds the 23rd song in the cycle particularly affecting. “It’s very poignant, because you’ve gone through such a huge journey and it’s in a major key….It’s heartbreaking, because you know that this person is going to die, and you also know that they’ll never get to be with this person that they’ve just voiced that they love. So it’s very sad, but also there’s a peacefulness to it. I think that always kind of breaks my heart when those are combined.”
It’s clear in chatting with Fenlon—who, in addition to being an accomplished singer and pianist, is a published poet—that she holds Schubert particularly dear. “I think he’s someone that can touch on what it is to be human, and to feel and to wonder and to question with such simplicity,” she observes. “I also think he’s one of the great storytellers, as well. And for me, he’s the composer that always gives me energy. It’s wild, because Winterreise is 75 minutes long, with no break, and you think that it would absolutely destroy you, but I always end the piece thinking I could do it all again.”
For Fenlon, the piece is a double test of endurance, as she also accompanies herself on piano—a talent she embraced after moving to Berlin in 2015. “I went without a plan, and I think that’s where a lot of magic can happen in life,” she reflects. “Those first two years were very hard, and I didn’t have anything really lined up, and I didn’t know who I was. And it was in that being lost and not knowing that everything opened up. I just organically started singing and playing….The Berlin cultural scene, it’s so inspiring and it’s so experimental. I think that also opened me up to thinking, ‘Wait, I don’t have to follow this thing that I thought I had to do.’”
She describes the sensation of being both singer and accompanist as wholly immersive. “It allows me to be so in the moment. I can be so present with the music and where it’s taking me….It feels extremely holistic and all encompassing. I always say it feels like I become the music, because there’s no room to think or second-guess. You’re just in it. I would compare it to, like, you’re either in the ocean or you’re not, you know? And that's how I feel.”
Not only does Fenlon accompany herself, she also performs entirely from memory. “My teachers used to say, ‘Know something by heart.’ And I never really understood what that meant until I was an adult. It’s like when you really actually know it inside of you; you can close your eyes and just feel it….Becoming the music is easier without something in front [of me]. So it’s personal. It eliminates a barrier for me…and it eliminates a barrier with the audience, because I’m already sitting behind a machine. I don’t want something else to be in the way as well.”
Since introducing her interpretation of Winterreise at the 2022 Oxford International Song Festival, Fenlon has performed the work for audiences in Germany, Portugal, Ontario, and Quebec. But her upcoming VRS concert has the distinction of also marking the launch of her debut album, with Orchid Classics, featuring the song cycle.
“It’s really exciting to start the season at home, and also to drop this album,” says Fenlon, who’ll be touring the work in North America and Europe through the upcoming season. “The Pacific Northwest is like the home of my soul and heart. There’s something particularly grounding also about preparing such a big piece and such a meaningful recital in your home.” 
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