april 17 2019 weds@ 7 U.C. San Diego
7 p.m. Conrad Prebys concert hall
Recital with pianist Donald Berman. Music by Nadia Boulanger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Viktor Ullmann, Ingrid Stölzel, Christopher Cerrone, Nina C. Young, Aaron Helgeson and Charles Ives.
Are songs a distillation of life's experience, for those who compose them and those who perform them? In their latest recital program, longtime collaborative partners soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman explore works of a distinct group of composers drawn from different generations and diverse personal histories, in songs with a wide range of musical expression from the folk-like and minimal to lush echoes of late Romanticism and multilayered textures of the modern.
May 2, 2019 San Diego New Music - in the land of forgotten dreams
Vocal chamber music. At the La Jolla Athenaeum. With guitarist Pablo Gomez Cano, flutist Michael Matsuno and soprano Kirsten Ashley Wiest. Program to include:
Alba Potes - Dulzuras
Toshio Hosokawa - Renka 1
Anna Thorvaldsdottir - Rain
Kaija Saariaho - From the grammar of dreams (for two sopranos)
Read Ken Herman’s review in San Diego Story.
September 15 2019 Distler performance hall tufts university Medford MA 3 p.m.
“ill, moody and tongue tied”
Recital with pianist Donald Berman. Music by Nadia Boulanger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Viktor Ullmann, Charles Ives and emerging composers Ingrid Stölzel, Christopher Cerrone, Nina C. Young, and Aaron Helgeson. Admission is free.
Are songs a distillation of life's experience, for those who compose them and those who perform them? In their latest recital program, longtime collaborative partners soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman explore works of a distinct group of composers drawn from different generations and diverse personal histories, in songs with a wide range of musical expression from the folk-like and minimal to lush echoes of late Romanticism and multilayered textures of the modern.
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was best known as one of the 20th century's most important and influential pedagogues, and taught a number of celebrated composers and musicians. She was also an active composer, though her works are infrequently performed; the songs and piano solo on the program date primarily from 1918-1922 and are notable for their concise, clear form and direct - in some cases - brutal, emotional expression.
Three of American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger's evocative settings of poems of Carl Sandburg, dating from 1929, are included as well. Crawford Seeger's compositional language is rooted firmly in the modern, yet she creates a delicate, variegated sound world that lifts and envelops Sandburg's candid imagery.
The Three Hölderlin Songs (1943) of Viktor Ullmann were written during the composer's internment at Terezin. The poems speak to the possibility of transcendence through our relationship to the natural world; these little known masterworks of the song genre are luminous and achingly beautiful.
The second half opens with music from a younger generation of composers: Ingrid Stölzel, Christopher Cerrone and Nina C. Young. Stölzel's Grand is the Seen captures Whitman's resplendent text, with a deft use of instrumental color and sweeping vocal lines. Cerrone's The Night with the Green Sky builds an atmosphere of almost suffocating fragility through the simplest of means. And in Swan Song, Nina C. Young creates a fusion of word and sound in which time seems suspended. Aaron Helgeson's piano solo, Through glimpses of unknowing explores the knife edge between sound and silence, with writing of delicacy and restraint.
The program concludes with songs by Charles Ives. Narucki and Berman have collaborated on music of Ives for decades, as their critically acclaimed recording The Light that is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives (New World) attests. The songs presented on this program include vignettes of an America that is long past, with a notable exception: West London. "ill, moody and tongue tied" is the description that Matthew Arnold applies to the homeless woman with her child, who seek help from the few to whom they are visible. Ives' song, nearly one hundred years old, illuminates what still surrounds us.