February 26, 2020 7 P.M. WEDS@7 Series
UC San Diego Conrad Prebys Concert Hall | PALimpsest
A Tribute to Mario Davidovsky
Vocal chamber music/ Soprano Susan Narucki performs the late Mario Davidovsky’s Biblical Songs for soprano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano, on a program focusing on Davidovsky’s music. Aleck Karis conducts.
The program also includes Davidovosky’s Flashbacks (flute, clarinet, violin violoncello, piano and percussion, Sefarad (baritone voice, flute, clarinet, percussion, vn, cello) and Pennplay, as well as works by Milton Babbit and a commissioned work by Yi-hsien Chen.
Narucki had a close relationship with Davidovsky, recording a number of the composer’s works for voice including Biblical Songs, Romancero, Songs from Shir-ha-Shirim. She presented the world premieres of Cancione Sine Textu with the Empyrean Ensemble and Shulamit’s Dream for voice and orchestra with the San Francisco Symphony.
March 4, 2020 7 p.m. WEDS@ 7 SERIES
UC San Diego Conrad Prebys Concert Hall | suddenly drenched with dawn
Voice and piano/vocal chamber music. Soprano Susan Narucki will present an evening of music that celebrates the human voice in its most intimate, lyrical and exuberant. The recital takes place at UC San Diego Department of Music’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on February 5, 2020 at 7 p.m. Narucki, will be joined by guest artists Aleck Karis (piano), Pablo Gomez (guitar), Kirsten Ashley Weist (soprano) Teresa Diaz-de-Cossio (flute) and Sean Dowgray (percussion).
The concert includes two distinctive works of modern vocal chamber music: Kaija Saariaho’s Adjö for voice, flute and guitar and Karin Rehnqvist’s Puksånger/Lockrop for two voices and percussion. Saariaho’s work is an exquisite setting of Solveig von Schoultz’s poem celebrating the return of the sun after months of darkness; Rehnqvist’s extended work incorporates Finnish proverbs about women, and traditional folk texts, and utilizes a traditional (and spectacular) vocal “herding-call” technique.
Two elegiac works for voice and guitar are included on the program: Hosokawa’s Renka I and songs by the English composer John Dowland. Both works speak to parting and loss through unique and elegant compositional styles separated by centuries.
Francis Poulenc’s lyrical masterwork for voice and piano, Tel Jour, Telle Nuit, is the other connecting thread of the program. Composed in 1937 with texts by surrealist poet Paul Éluard, the cycle of nine songs traverses a landscape of the unusual and beautiful, describing a journey less to a specific destination than to a place within, suddenly drenched with dawn.
Susan Narucki is a Professor of Music at UC San Diego and leads the Arts and Community Engagement Initiative for the Division of Arts and Humanities. Her most recent recording “The Edge of Silence: Vocal Chamber Music of György Kurtág” has been nominated for a 2020 Grammy Award as Best Classical Vocal Album.