Schubert with some shut-eye

You've seen it all but you haven’t. Last night at the Wigmore Hall, pianist Michael Gees played a recital of 25 Schubert songs with his eyes shut. Most of the audience became aware of this feat only when his fellow German, tenor Christoph Prégardien, also closed his eyes for eight minutes to sing the last two songs.

“I hope it was all right,” Gees, a composer and music professor in Cologne, said afterwards about his somnambulism on the platform.

For his two hours in a dream he negotiated Schubert’s harmonic mantraps without a glance at the score and no more than a handful of wrong notes. The page-turner took the night off.