Franui & Florian Boesch
Biography Franui & Florian Boesch
Florian Boesch
has appeared with the Vienna Chamber Opera and in a number of Mozart operas, singing Figaro, Count Almaviva, Don Giovanni, Leporello, Guglielmo and Papageno at the Klagenfurt Stadttheater, the Vienna Volksoper, Opernhaus Zürich, Wuppertal Theater, Staatstheater Stuttgart and the Bolshoy Theatre in Moscow. He has been heard at the festivals of Bregenz and Salzburg, where he appeared in Handel’s Radamisto, in Der Rosenkavalier and in Le nozze di Figaro under Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He is also a frequent guest on the concert platform, with a repertoire that ranges from Bach to Wolf and Mahler. Engagements have taken him to the Vienna Musikverein, the Vienna and Berlin Konzerthaus, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Styriarte Festival, the Haydn Festival Eisenstadt, the Edinburgh Festival, and to Milan, Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York.
As an acclaimed singer of Lieder he has appeared at the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Cologne Philharmonic, the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, and in Birmingham. He has sung Schubert’s Winterreise in New York City, Tokyo, Leeds, Vienna and Graz, and given recitals at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Wigmore Hall in London, as well as in the BBC Radio 3 lunchtime recitals series.
Franui
is the name of a mountain pasture close to the small village of Inner- villgraten, located at 1,402 metres above sea level in East Tyrol in Austria, where most of the Franui musicians grew up. The word is of Rhaeto-Romanic origin and refers to the proximity of Innervillgraten to the Ladin-speaking region in the Dolomite Alps.
The Musicbanda of the same name have been playing together in nearly the same lineup since 1993 and are frequently invited to perform at major festivals and venues (e. g. Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna Burgtheater, Salzburg Festival, Bregenzer Festspiele, Ruhrtriennale, Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Philharmonie Köln, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Zurich, Holland Festival, Philharmonie de Paris).
Their adaptations of lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler have earned Franui renown beyond the borders of Austria. The ensemble regard themselves as a “transformer station between classical music, folk music, jazz and contemporary chamber music;” sometimes the original is lovingly celebrated in all its beauty, at others it is turned rightside up (or upside down), stripped down to its bare bones, enhanced, painted over, elaborated, in a process that blurs the boundaries between interpretation and improvisation, between arrangement and (re)composition.
For their live shows and music theater productions Franui frequently collaborate with other exceptional performers, including baritone Florian Boesch, writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, puppeteer Nikolaus Habjan, the mask theater ensemble Familie Flöz, video artist Jonas Dahlberg or actors Dörte Lyssewski, Sven-Eric Bechtolf and Peter Simonischek.
Since 2015 Franui have been in charge of programming the festival “Gemischter Satz” hosted by Konzerthaus Vienna each year in May, which presents new forms of interaction between music, art, literature and wine.
Franui’s albums are released with the label col legno and have won several prizes. In 2018 “Ständchen der Dinge,” the album celebrating the ensemble’s 25th anniversary, won the German Record Critics’ Award.
