Recent news and reviews: James Dillon: Philomela CD Review from U.K. Guardian/Andrew Clements www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/27/james-dillon-philomela 

Thomas Ades "Life Story" on San Diego's acclaimed Art of Elan series. www.sandiego.com/arts/bold-and-clever-new-sounds-at-the-museum-of-art

Sushi:  Fresh Sounds

www.kpbs.org/news/2010/jan/04/fresh-sound-margaret-noble-susan-narucki/

Soprano Susan Narucki, guitarist Jason Vieux and members of the Philadelphia Orchestra present the world premiere of Jan Krzywicki's In Evening's Shadow, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.  The 17 minute work is a tribute to the late guitarist Peter Segal. 

Soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman present a program of songs of Charles Ives, at UC San Diego's new series Weds@7.  The program features a range of Ives's songs from early works to his masterpieces, including Like a Sick Eagle, The Housatonic At Stockbridge, and Tom Sails Away.   In addition, Mr. Berman will present works for solo piano and celeste by Ives, Eric Moe and David Rakowski. 

The recital will be given in the superb new Conrad Prebys Music Center on the UC Campus.  Ms. Narucki is on the faculty of the music department at UC San Diego. 

Soprano Susan Narucki joins UCSD colleague and La Jolla Symphony conductor Steven Schick in Golijov's haunting Three Songs for soprano and orchestra.  For more information see:

lajollasymphony.com

Anthony Tommasini of the NY Times on  "The Blue Rider in Performance:"

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/25blue.html

Bruce Hodges of Artcritical.com:

artcritical.com/hodges/BHBlueRider.htm

The Blue Rider In Performance explores the dynamic interaction of music, light, and visual imagery using materials from Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc's seminal Blue Rider Almanac of 1912. Rooted in Kandinsky's connections to artists in both Russia and Germany, the Blue Rider Almanac brought together art, music, and writing from avant-garde movements across Europe, capturing a short-lived moment of international experimentalism that was abruptly halted by the outbreak of World War I.

Pianist Sarah Rothenberg and soprano Susan Narucki perform music from the era by such composers as Scriabin, Webern, and Berg under a rich blanket of light and projection; world premiere choreography by Karole Armitage further illuminate movements from Arnold Schoenberg’s ground-breaking Second String Quartet, performed by The Brentano String Quartet with Ms. Narucki.

Sarah Rothenberg, concept, direction, and piano
Marcus Doshi, lighting and set designer
Sven Ortel, projection designer
Brentano String Quartet
Susan Narucki, soprano
Karole Armitage, choreographer
with dancers from Armitage Gone! Dance

millertheater.com/Events/EventDetails.aspx
 

Co-produced with Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Mary Sharp Cronson, Producer,
In conjunction with Kandinsky, on view at the Guggenheim Museum starting September 18.

Composer Martin Bresnick and soprano Susan Narucki are featured in an interview in the June/July issue of Chamber Music Magazine, which details the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival's Virgil Thomson Project.  This two week program. led by Brenick and Narucki, along with pianists Lisa Moore and J.J. Penna, brings together composers, singers and instrumentalists, to discuss the influence of Thomson's music,  and the fine art of text setting in English.  The workshop will culminate in two programs of new works for voice and ensemble, and American Art Songs.   As well, Narucki and Penna present a program of American song on June 27, including Thomson's cycle Mostly About Love.

www.chamber-music.org/pdf/magazine/2009/VirgilAM.pdf

Soprano Susan Narucki joins esteemed colleagues conductor  Reinbert de Leeuw and members of the Asko/Schoenberg Ensemble for one of Claude Vivier's most complex and beautiful works:  Trois Air Pour Un Opera Imaginaire.  At Amsterdam's Concertgebouw on 3/24 and De Singel in Antwerp  on 3/25.  For complete details see Calendar section fo this website.

Arlene Sierra's beguiling music received praise from the NY Times. Included in the Composer's Portrait program at Miller Theater, was Neruda Settings,  for voice and ensemble, sung by Susan Narucki with members of ICE.

www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/arts/music/17sier.html

The Light That Is Felt:  Songs of Charles Ives,  has earned more critical acclaim with reviews in The Wire, Diverdi and Fanfare.  For complete text go to:  susannarucki.net/blog/

Americans In Rome, a four CD set honoring American composers who won the Rome Prize, has received praise from Gramophone magazine:  soprano Susan Narucki's contributions were singled out. Go to:

susannarucki.net/blog/

ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) presents a composer's portrait of young American composer, Arlene Sierra, at Columbia University's Miller Theater.  Soprano Susan Narucki joins the group for Sierra's Neruda Settings, for voice and chamber ensemble.  The 25 minute work is a setting of four of Neruda's beloved Elemental Odes.  

Miller Theater, 116th and Broadway, NYC, 8 p.m.

Alex Ross of The New Yorker on last week's performance of Lisa Bielawa's Chance Encounter, by soprano Susan Narucki and the Knights at the Whitney Museum:

www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/03/02/090302gonb_GOAT_notebook_ross

For more info on Chance Encounter:  susannarucki.net/news-projects.php

The Light that is Felt:  Songs of Charles Ives has been chosen as the BBC Music Magazine's North American pick of the month for February 2009.  For the complete review, go to

susannarucki.net/news-latest.php

Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe reviews the January 26, 2009 Collage concert, with guest artist soprano Susan Narucki.

www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/01/28/collage_new_music_attends_to_works_of_the_recent_past/

Conductor Lionel Bringuier, soprano Susan Narucki, and members of the LA Master Chorale, earned high praise from Mark Swed, music critic of the LA Times for the Jan 20 performance of  Louis Andriessen's De Stilj at  Disney Hall in Los Angeles, as part of the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. 

latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/01/post.html

The New Yorker's Russell Platt on the best classical CD's of late including "The Light That is Felt" by Soprano Susan Narucki and Pianist Donald Berman

www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/recordings/2009/01/19/090119gore_GOAT_recordings_platt

The New York Times Review  January 16, 2009

THE LIGHT THAT IS FELT: SONGS OF CHARLES IVES

Susan Narucki, soprano; Donald Berman, pianist. New World Records 80680-2; CD.

MOST artists crave the limelight, but Charles Ives often worked in isolation, his day job in insurance providing the financial means to indulge his passion. He wrote nearly 200 songs and published 114 of them privately in 1922, describing their publication as “a kind of house cleaning.”

The painterly details of Ives’s songs are vividly conveyed by the bright-voiced Susan Narucki and the pianist Donald Berman on a new disc whose 27 diverse selections (most from H. Wiley Hitchcock’s 2004 critical edition) highlight Ives’s multiple influences. Those included European Romanticism and religious and secular American tunes, which he meshed with his own inventive, radical harmonies. Like Bartok, Ives used both simple folk melodies and dissonance, sometimes blending them.

Gentle, melodic songs are interspersed here with more tumultuous works, demonstrating the wide spectrum of Ives’s emotional and musical palette. The spare and evocative “Where the Eagle Cannot See” is followed by the theatrical, astringent intensity of “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” The heavy weariness of “Like a Sick Eagle” is aptly conveyed by Ms. Narucki and Mr. Berman, before they plunge into the violent waters of “Swimmers,” whose wildly turbulent piano part underpins a soaring vocal line.

The disc opens with the wistful, tonal “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and concludes with the Romantic “Romanzo (di Central Park).” Also included are the pictorial “Tom Sails Away,” with its lively evocations of town and family life, and “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.”

Romantic, Brahmsian songs like “Du Bist wie Eine Blume” (“You Are Like a Flower”), “Feldeinsamkeit” (“In Summer Fields”) and “Minnelied” (“Love Song”) reflect Ives’s interest in German lieder. His less familiar, moody settings of translations of poems by the medieval Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano are more harmonically imaginative.

VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

At Amsterdam's Muziekbgebouw, at 20:30 , as part of worldwide concerts celebrating the 100th birthday of the great American composer Elliott Carter,   the Nieuw Ensemble performs a program of Carter's chamber music, including the Oboe Quartet and the song cycle Tempo e Tempi, with soprano Susan Narucki as soloist.   Garry Walker conducts. 

A world premiere recording of Ernst Krenek's comic opera "What Price Confidence?" featuring sopranos Ilana Davidson and Susan Narucki, tenor Richard Clement, bartione Christopheren Nomura and pianist Linda Hall has been released on the  Phoenix Edition label.   Presented in a series of sold out performances at the NYC Austrian Cultural Forum's Mostly Modern Series, "What Price Confidence?" is an amusing and poignant look at two couples, their loves, and their betrayals.  Krenek's music portrays  the characters inner lives and outward foibles with equal measures of depth, dash and wit.  

For more information:  www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_m

This four disc collection on Bridge Records contains works by thirty-seven composers who composed these pieces while in residence at the American Academy in Rome.  The earliest work dates from 1920, the most recent from 2003.  Composers include the well known: Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, and Roger Sessions; the largely forgotten: Charles Naginski, Alexander Lang Steinert, Walter Helfer; and many of today's most active voices: Robert Beaser, David Rakowski, Aaron Jay Kernis, Paul Moravec, Stephen Hartke,  and David Lang.  Curated by Donald Berman, the disc features  performances by many of today's leading performers of contemporary music, including  Richard Stoltzman, Yehudi Wyner, Susan Narucki, Tony Arnold, Fred Sherry, Daniel Druckman, and Curtis Macomber. 

www.bridgerecords.com/pages/catalog/9271.htm

The Light That is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives is now available on New World Records.  www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi 

The disc by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman contains 27 songs of Charles Ives, ranging from his early days as a student at Yale to the works of his maturity, including his masterwork General William Booth Enter  Into Heaven.    For more information on the disc, please go to the  News-Latest Release page. 

Welcome to Susan Narucki.net!  The new website, designed by Ian Loew of LForm Design www.lform.com   contains news, soundclips, and  information about the award-winning soprano, as well as a comprehensive discography section.   The site also features a blog, which will go live in two weeks. 

Soprano Susan Narucki, a leading interpreter of contemporary music, joins the faculty at UC San Diego as Professor of Voice.   Narucki's repertoire ranges from Stravinsky to Oliver Messiaen, Gerard Grisey, Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter. She earned a Grammy for her recording of George Crumb's "Star-Child", and she has presented more than one hundred world premieres. 

UCSD's Department of Music is internationally recognized as the West Coast's premiere center for education and innovation in new music. Founded in 1966 by composers Robert Erickson and Will Ogdon, it was designed to provide a unique environment in which composers, performers and scholars could collaborate and engage with the most vital ideas and newest technologies in order to push the boundaries of contemporary music.

Narucki joins the performance faculty that also includes saxophonist David Borgo, clarinetist Anthony Burr, pianist Anthony Davis, contrabassist Mark Dresser, flutist John Fonville, bass-baritone Philip Larson, cellist Charles Curtis, pianist Aleck Karis, violinist János Négyesy and percussionist Steven Schick,

To read more,  please see: 

music.ucsd.edu/media/news.php