The 31-year-old baritone, guitarist and singer-songwriter Bryan Benner likes to refer to himself tongue-in-cheek as “Schubadour.” A label that does only rudimentary justice to the extraordinary diversity of his musical passions and forms of expression, but one that illustrates his unpretentious yet virtuosically playful approach to a wide variety of genres.
The musician has attracted international attention above all with the formation he founded five years ago, “The Erlkings”: a band quartet with an unusual line-up of tuba, guitar, cello and drums, which applies unusual, new musical garments to the art songs respectfully translated into English by Benner – primarily by Schubert and Schumann – with creativity, care and heart and soul. Without ever speculatively betraying the classical tradition, Benner makes the song material his own in this way and breathes a contemporary breath into it – also through the spirited presentation.
Benner, who was born in Orlando (Florida, USA), first spent his years of teaching and traveling – with the support of a private scholarship from Sir Sean Connery – in Glasgow at the Royal Scottish Conservatory. After completing his vocal studies and a two-year stopover in Italy, from which he took with him above all his love of Neapolitan folk song, he continued his education in 2011 with the three-year master’s degree program in solo singing – in Angelika Kirchschlager’s Lied class, among others – at the Vienna Conservatory. Since then he has been living and working in Vienna: “What better could a musician ask for?”
With the quartet “Die Wandervögel”, founded in 2015, he dedicates himself in the tradition of “Zup-fgeigenhansel” to the revival of Austrian, German and Yiddish folk, soldier, worker and farmer songs from the last four centuries. As a singer-songwriter, he always takes new, different paths when setting his songs to music: together with his band “Bryan Benner & The Pool Boys” (CD “Fat Sunshine”), as a duo with multi-instrumentalist and singer Christoph Zimper (CD “Giniginamar”) or, as most recently, completely on his own (DCD “The Modern Man, The Modern Muse”).
In order to offer his many different musical passions a common stage, he also created the “Late-Night Liederabend” in 2015, to which he has since invited three top-class acts from a wide variety of genres – from alternative to singer-songwriter, folk and jazz to classical music – to play short sets each month at changing locations and then make music together. “I’m very happy to live in Vienna,” says Bryan Benner, “and I hope they’ll let me stay for a long time. Because I still have a lot of ideas.”
Text: Peter Blau, Ö1