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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?”<\/p>\n
With the quartet “Die Wanderv\u00f6gel”, 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”).<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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Text: Peter Blau, \u00d61<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3425,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categories":[56,55],"class_list":["post-4021","artists","type-artists","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2019-fall","category-2021-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artists\/4021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artists"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/artists"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpenarte.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}