Baritone Benjamin Appl, who’s been called “the most promising of today’s up-and-coming song recitalists” by the Financial Times, made his Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival debut in 2024 and quickly became a Festival-audience favorite—which makes his return this summer, when he sings three song cycles by Schubert, one of the most highly anticipated events of the season.
Despite studying business administration and having worked in a bank, Appl, who sang in the boys’ choir at the Regensburg Cathedral in his hometown of Regensburg, Germany, decided to pursue vocal training as well—a decision that led to him enrolling at such prestigious institutions as the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich and the Guildhall School for Music and Drama in London. Perhaps most significantly, Appl also became one of legendary German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s final students, having studied with him first in a master class in Austria in 2009 and then privately in his homes in Berlin and Bavaria.
Fischer-Dieskau “has always [been] a big idol to me,” Appl said in an interview with WGTE Public Media. “When I was 12 years old,” he continued, “I, for the first time, heard his voice, and it moved me like nothing else before.”
Appl studied with Fischer-Dieskau over the course of three years—until just before the latter’s death, in 2012, at the age of 86. “I had the great fortune to be mentored by him,” Appl said in that same WGTE interview. “I came regularly to his houses, and we worked for five, six hours a day, and I was able to go with him through my entire repertoire. . . . He was thirsty and hungry to dig deeper into the repertoire,” he added. “He was someone who searched all the time.”
Searching, in a different way—for love, connection, or belonging—is at the heart of the Schubert songs Appl performs at the Festival alongside acclaimed pianist Simon Lepper. The duo makes their first appearance of the season on Sunday, August 16, when they render a landmark work of the piano-vocal repertoire, Die schöne Müllerin, on a program that also includes Schubert’s final chamber work, the Cello Quintet, featuring cellists Clive Greensmith and Harriet Krijgh. The next day, on Monday, August 17, Appl and Lepper perform Schubert’s profoundly moving and posthumously assembled song cycle Schwanengesang (Swan Song), which follows a performance by pianist Kirill Gerstein, violinist William Hagen, and cellist Peter Stumpf of Beethoven’s groundbreaking Archduke Trio.
Appl and Lepper mark their final appearance on Wednesday, August 19, with perhaps the pinnacle of the art-song repertoire: Schubert’s mournful and achingly beautiful Winterreise, which the composer said he liked “more than any of my other songs.” Appl, in a video for Classic FM, described the one-of-a-kind masterwork as having “all emotions in the cycle” and being “really a big, big journey.”