Luckily, you’re a sitting giant, because at 1.96 meters, Benjamin Appl’s height is a little frightening. But you can meet the baritone, who was born in Regensburg in 1982, at eye level when he begins to talk sonorously in a charming Upper Palatinate accent.
The interview quickly circles around the new CD with the Munich Radio Orchestra under the direction of 27-year-old Oscar Jockel. It contains Schubert songs in orchestral versions by various composers such as Brahms, Reger, Webern and Britten. Appl definitely has a message: “I often sing these songs with an orchestra in concerts. Maybe I’ll reach someone who usually only goes to an orchestra concert or the opera. Maybe they’ll become curious, find it exciting and come to one Song recital.”
Benjamin Appl learned a lot early on with the Regensburger Domspatzen: “sight-singing, music theory, getting involved with other people through all the traveling.” Appl, who switched almost seamlessly from a boy’s voice to a male voice in the choir at the age of 16, had to learn a few things again, such as listening to each other and waiting. Instead, it was now a matter of “finding your own tone, your own vibrato, independent timbres and an individual statement.”
Even back then there was the idea of perhaps studying singing at some point. First of all, there was the banking apprenticeship and a business administration degree. After a year and a half, Appl was no longer satisfied with the dry material and “I completely missed working on inner worlds, but I wanted to finish that and study singing at the same time.” He wasn’t allowed to do that in Munich. So Appl commuted between Regensburg with business administration and Augsburg with singing.
He then attended the August Everding Theater Academy in Munich until he began postgraduate studies in London in 2010, also to learn English. A decision was soon required: “Until 2015, I kept getting lucrative offers from my bank, whose boss had taken a liking to me and probably wanted to build me up to be his successor. That was on days when my voice wasn’t so round or even an audition didn’t work, it was very tempting.”
From 2013 onwards, when Appl was 31 years old, things went better and better, the live recording from March 2015 from the Wigmore Hall with a pure Schubert program is a nice calling card. Appl got more and more engagements and realized that he could probably make a living from singing.
“Heimat”, recorded in the studio a year and a half later, contains a very intelligently mixed program like “Forbidden Fruit” from the beginning of this year. He sings a wide variety of interrelated repertoire with a fine but definitely virile timbre and great creative power.
He currently lives in London
A “Winterreise” is also available on CD, but unfortunately not on DVD, the BBC film with a spectacular version that caused a sensation on Swiss television and in England. The setting was the Red Tower at the highest point of the Julier Pass in Graubünden at 2284 meters. It served as a temporary cultural center for five years. Appl didn’t just use his CD for the audio track, but recorded everything again live in images and sound, partly by his pianist James Baillieu, with whom he harmonizes without words, ten meters away. Sometimes on a different level in the tower and often without eye contact. Sometimes he even had to sing outside at minus 18 degrees after a few hours of waiting in the snowstorm: “I had a button with the piano part in my ear and a small microphone stuck to my temple.”
The film was announced for December 23rd, but “two weeks before that I pulled the ripcord and said: The film won’t come out.” Then everything was revised again and the first broadcast only took place in February. The reactions were consistently positive and this film also brought people into contact with the song who had never heard Schubert songs live.
The fact that Appl’s center of life is (still) in London is also due to the importance of song singing in this city, because “there are still a lot of people here with Jewish roots who grew up in Germany. And the German song is always for them another nice memory of ‘home’https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose last student he was, also told him this. “At his song recitals, many people lip-synced the text silently throughout the evening.” This was passed on to the children, but Appl also emphasizes: When I started studying in London, I took every opportunity to sing recitals, even in front of 20 old ladies in the hall. So I tried out my repertoire and, over time, found my audience.”
Benjamin Appl with the Munich Philharmonic, with works by Fauré, among others, Saturday, October 7th, 7 p.m., and Sunday, October 8th, 11 a.m., Isarphilharmonie, www.mphil.de