Coming Soon, Benjamin Appl signs exclusive contract with Sony

Sony Classical announced yesterday that they have signed an exclusive recording contract with Benjamin Appl, the London-based German baritone who's been making waves with his eloquent accounts of Schubert and Schumann over the past couple of years since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 2013.

Educated in Munich and London, Appl studied with Helmut Deutsch and Rudolf Piernay and was mentored by the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau before becoming a BBC New Generation Artist in 2014.

Recent engagements on the concert platform have included Carmina Burana with the BBC Concert Orchestra at last year's Proms, St Matthew Passions under Roger Norrington and Paul McCreesh, and the Britten War Requiem at the 2014 Aldeburgh Festival; on the operatic stage he has performed the title-role in Owen Wingrave, Schaunard in La bohème, and Aeneas to Ann Murray's Dido at the Brighton Festival.

But it is in lieder he's made his greatest impact thus far: a prolific recitalist, he's given a string of acclaimed Schubert concerts at high-profile venues throughout Europe with Graham Johnson as well as taking on the major German song-cycles, including a Winterreise with Malcolm Martineau, a Schöne Müllerin with Joseph Middleton and a Dichterliebe with Gary Matthewman.

The newly-released recording of his Wigmore Hall recital with Johnson prompted Gramophone to describe him as 'the current front-runner in the next generation of Lieder singers', and the Birmingham Post praised a recent Schumann recital just down the road from Presto HQ for Appl's 'fabulously intelligent and probing colouring of words, a clarity of diction which projected so grippingly in this difficult acoustic, and wonderfully-timbred range of compass'.

Sony reveal that the new contract “will see a first release early in 2017 and will be a programme of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg and a number of English composers.” Announcing the news on social media yesterday, Appl described his new partnership with the label as "something very, very special in my professional life so far".