news archives
April 15, 2022
I Care if You Listen:ListNUp Lisa Bielawa
On I Care if You Listen, the website for all things modern music, Lisa Bielawa’s desert island list of ten essential cds includes Susan’s iconic 1996 recording of Claude Vivier’s Bouchara, with the Asko/Schoenberg and the late Reinbert deLeeuw. Susan’s adovcacy of the music of Claude Vivier with the Asko/Schoenberg lasted over a decade, and Lisa and Susan were collaborators on the Chance Encounter project, bringing modern music to public spaces in 2007.
March 13, 2022
Susan Narucki in conversation with Ian parsons on “Writing to Vermeer” The sound barrier (PBS-FM)
Susan Narucki joined host Ian Parsons, on the March 13 2022 episode of The Sound Barrier, a radio program devoted to the music of the Avant Garde and Experimental in conversation about Louis Andriesssen’s opera Writing to Vermeer, in which she created the role of Catherina Bolnes, the wife of the painter Johannes Vermeer.
Parsons writes with exceptional clarity and understanding about Andriessen’s music in his introduction to the opera; anyone with an interest in the work of this remarkable composer will benefit from reading Parsons’ notes and hearing the program.
February 16, 2022
This Island - Operawire
Susan Narucki to Record Rare Art Songs Album ‘This Island’. The album will be released in 2022 through AVIE Records and Narucki will record the songs with her longtime collaborator pianist Donald Berman in March and June of 2022.
The award-winning singer says that “a single reference contained in a book of Rilke’s letters set me on a path to discover these songs, in response to the unprecedented circumstances of the past two years.”
The quote that inspired Narucki is from Rilke’s “The Dark Interval;” it reads, “If you could only be here with me so I could share with you the happiness of these great poems, they would let you realize what we all now need more urgently: that transience is not separation…'”
June 21, 2021
An Introduction to Charles Ives; the Charles Ives Society
Author and renowned musicologist J. Peter Burkholder is joined by fellow Ives experts pianist Jeremy Denk, conductor Leonard Slatkin, soprano Susan Narucki, and pianist and Charles Ives Society President Donald Berman for a discussion on / introduction to Charles Ives, moderated by BMI Foundation President Deirdre Chadwick. J. Peter Burkholder recently released his new book, Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America, a listening guide and invitation into the music of Ives.
The conversation is a splendid introduction to the music of Charles Ives and to Burkholder’s book, Listening to Charles Ives, published by Amadeus Press. Watch it here on YouTube.
December 2020
Inheritance recording - critic’s Choice, Opera News
“…Inheritance is a meditation of the meaning of Winchester’s life and on the hopelessness of the rampant gun violence in American culture. Winchester ruminates on the house, the thousands of Native American lives lost in the “settlement” of the West, the loss of her daughter (who lived but a few weeks) and the fate of the passenger pigeon, brought to extinction by unchecked hunting. The opera is dreamy and ethereal, with mysterious music and ambiguous texts. But there are moments of clarity and references in the music to gunfire, manufacturing machinery and the pounding of hammers, contrasted with the keening of spirits and furtive, occasionally frenetic sounds from the harpsichord…
Liang employs many recurring musical leitmotifs, small and unusual enough to avoid seeming pedantic. He has the instrumental ensemble incoroporate many extended playing techniques throughout to create unusual, otherworldly sound colors…Similarly, most of the music sounds unmetered, though the excellent small essay in the booklet notes explains how craftily structured it really is. The music drifts from scene to scene, much as Sarah Winchester would wander around in the house.
Susan Narucki, as Sarah, again demonstrates that she’s one of the great practioners of contemporary vocal music. She vividly displays Sarah’s sorrow, loneliness, bitterness and confusion. She’s lyrical where the music allows and can traverse the wide leaps and disjointed passages with suave nuance….There’s much to admire and cogitate upon here. “ - Arlo Mc Kinnon
December 2020
San Francisco Classical Voice - 2020’s Best Recordings
Inheritance Lei Liang/Susan Narucki/Steven Schick
Inheritance is among Peter Feher’s list of the year’s best recordings from Southern California artists. Read the entire article here.
“Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions. On the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, Liang studied at the New England Conservatory and Harvard. Inheritance, his chamber opera with libretto by Matt Donovan, draws attention to the hopelessness associated with gun violence in the U.S., exploring the psychological effect on one of the heirs to the fortune made by the Winchester rifle, Sarah Winchester.
That role is performed by the extraordinary soprano Susan Narucki, who has presented more than 150 world premieres in opera, concert, and recording. Conducted by Steven Schick. SFCV reviewed the recording earlier this year. (Albany Records)” Peter Feher
December 6, 2020
SD Union Tribune: Pulitzer Prize, Library of Congress induction and Grammy nomination cap banner year for San Diego musicians
Singer Susan Narucki 2020 Grammy Award nominee
“Susan Narucki easily stood out among the 2020 Grammy Awards nominees. The acclaimed contemporary classical and chamber opera maverick was nominated in the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album category for “The Edge of Silence — Works For Voice By György Kurtág,” an album on which she sings entirely in Hungarian, Russian and German.
Even if it was performed solely in one language, the music by storied Hungarian composer Kurtág is deviously challenging. So are the lyrics, which are set to poems by Dezso Tandori, Kobayashi Issa, Rimma Dalos, Amy Karolyi and Pal Gulyas.
The album was a labor of love for UC San Diego music professor Narucki, who has three previous Grammy nominations to her credit. She has commissioned and performed several edgy chamber operas that cover such sobering issues as gun violence and human trafficking. The pieces she performs on the Kurtág album are musical miniatures that require exceptional precision and emotional intensity.
“One of the things I learned working directly with Kurtág, which I have done on a number of occasions, is that music is a living thing,” Narucki told the Union-Tribune in January, shortly before attending the 62nd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.
“The way in which Kurtág notates his music — and the way I understand he wants it to be executed — is for it to be spontaneous and asymmetrical. So, it’s almost as if you gather the intensity of thought and emotion, like a storm, and then let it burst forth.”
She did not win, alas. But Narucki already had a Grammy victory to her credit. In 2000, she was the featured vocal soloist on composer George Crumb’s “Star-Child,” which won in the Best Classical Contemporary Composition category. And she is the featured singer on the 2020 album, “Inheritance,” a chamber-opera about the legacy of American gun violence that she commissioned.” - George Varga
October 2020
Gramophone (u.K.) on Inheritance
“…This opera in 10 scenes is constucted so that Susan Narucki’s great set piece, Sarah Winchester’s narrative of dread, hope and madness, ‘Once in New Haven, as I held my daughter to my breast’, emerges not so much out of the story, which is so appropriately disembodied as to be non-existent beyond the basic contours of Winchester’s life, but from the depths of accountability amplified by personal grief. In this and the following even more hair-raising scene, Narucki forces her character to experience almost impossible contrasts of beauty and pain.
While Lei Liang’s opera must obviously be seen to be fully experienced, especially given the press of current events, so sensitively and imaginatively does he mix and match his kaleidoscopic sonic palette to Matt Donovan’s freely evocative, numerology-obsessed libretto, the quartet of voices, the curious ensemble and the electronics that the highly charged narrative makes a deep impression even without the stagecraft. The recording captures the drama, layering the voices with the ideally captured instrumental riffs so that it’s all perfectly clear and precise without being surgical….” - Laurence Vittes
September 27, 2020
San Diego Union Tribune - Phenomenal Women Series
Soprano Susan Narucki was honored to be among many incredible artists and creators named in the San Diego Union Tribune’s ongoing series, honoring women of distinction in our region.
“Grammy Award-winning soprano and UC San Diego music professor Susan Narucki is equal parts musician and social activist. Appointed UCSD’s director of art and community engagement in 2019, she champions timely causes with as much passion as she sings about them…” - George Varga
September 14, 2020
San Francisco Classical voice - Inheritance examines America’s Gun Culture
Jason Victor Serinus’ excellent review of the world premiere recording of Lei Liang’s Inheritance.
“Less than two years after its world premiere at UC San Diego, Lei Liang and Matt Donovan’s one-act chamber opera, Inheritance, has received a definitive recording on CD (Albany Troy1819). In a project sparked, in part, by the astounding Susan Narucki (Sarah Winchester), whose three decades before the public has helped generate a sizable number of recordings and premieres, Inheritance uses the life of psychotic spirit-consulting Sarah Winchester (1840–1922), daughter-in-law of Winchester Repeating Gun Company founder Oliver Winchester and heir to the Winchester fortune, to examine America’s “inheritance” of her murder-ridden karma..”
August 12, 2020
Opera (Taiwan) Black and Blue: Thoughtful opera from the Barrel of a gun
Ken Smith’s thoughtful article discusses Jenine Tesori’s opera Blue and the world premiere recording of Lei Liang’s Inheritance.
"“…Despite their stark differences in dramatic and musical language Blue and Inheritance both share a certain mythic underpinning…Not since Doctor Atomic …have operatic characters been so haunted - or had their humanity called into question-by technological advancement.
Perhaps Sarah Winchester’s underlying problem in thinking that she’s haunted by ghosts is not that she’s going mad, but rather in a world that becomes so obsessed with her family’s products, she’s the only sane one left.”
August 9, 2020
Percorsi Musicale: Eredità delle armi ed eredità dell’opera
“…In Inheritance, l’opera composta da Lei Liang, si ottiene un nuovo, esilarante episodio di drammaturgiacondotta secondo l’organizzazione delle opere moderne di cui si parlava prima: Liang si concentra sullastoria vera della famiglia Winchester, il famoso produttore di armi, prendendo in esame le turbepsicologiche della signora Sarah, la moglie del ricco fabbricante, che resta prigioniera ed intimidita incasa per via dei rimorsi di coscienza che la invadono: alcuni spiriti, che rappresentano uomini o donneuccisi grazie alle armi costruite dal marito, la infastidiscono continuamente e la terrorizzano; èun’esplorazione della responsabilità sociale ed economica, una riflessione che Liang mette in circolosenza passare dai canoni dell’opera orientale (come avrebbe potuto fare viste le sue origini) e che si basasu dieci scene che alternano passato e presente in una sorta di continuo flashback. Matt Donovan è illibrettista, Sarah è interpretata da una magistrale Susan Narucki, sempre in combutta verbale con i duespiriti e la guida (Kirsten Wiest, Hillary Jean Young e Josué Céron), le coreografie e i disegni sono di Ligia Bouton e la parte musicale è costituita da un ensemble di 8 musicisti condotto da Steven Schick (coneccellenti musicisti come Mark Dresser al contrabbasso e Anthony Burr al clarinetto, tra gli altri); lacomponente visiva comprende un attento gioco di luci che crea un ambiente inquietante, una grandetela dove si proiettano immagini in tema, dove la funzione rafforzativa degli argomenti vienecorroborata da proiezioni di giornali che denunciano gli eventi luttuosi….
Narucki ha il compito di indirizzare il suo soprano nell’evocazione della riflessione tragica, in unpanorama sonoro che fa di tutto per stemperare i lati più intensi della psicosi drammaturgica.L’argomento politico non è certo una novità nell’opera ma non è nemmeno troppo frequente: in Americaautori come John Adams, Anthony Davis o Matthew Aucoin hanno risaltato questo aspetto e qualcunopensa addirittura che possa essere un rimedio per salvare l’interesse su un genere che sta subendo unprocesso di degrado della qualità come conseguenza del degrado culturale; Liang non solo tiene altal’attenzione su questa caratteristica determinante dell’opera, contribuendo così all’inevitabileripercussione del pensiero finale del pubblico in sala sull’argomento armi, ma evita anche gliappesantimenti che un’opera contemporanea può nascondere nei suoi sviluppi. Inheritance è, dunque, iltentativo di un “risveglio” intelligente dell’opera e di una mediazione della complessità sonora,probabilmente un trampolino di lancio per un più duraturo salto nella ponderazione di una societàmusicale che sappia riconoscere i suoi difetti, che sappia comprendere le nuove configurazioni dell’opera come entità snelle, attraenti nella produzione e portatrici di messaggi.” - Ettore Garzia
Inheritance - A Chamber Opera World premiere recording
July 7, 2020
Photo credit: Farshid Bazmandegan
Lei Liang’s evocative and haunting opera, Inheritance has been released on the Albany label. The sixty minute work which addresses the issue of gun violence in America, was commissioned and produced by soprano Susan Narucki, who created the role of Sarah Winchester, protagonist of the opera.
With libretto by award winning poet Matt Donovan, Inheritance juxtaposes episodes from Winchester’s life with the all-too-frequent incidences of random gun violence in contemporary American life. Co-presented by ArtPower and the Department of Music at the University of California at San Diego, the work had its world premiere performances in 2018.
The recording was producted by Grammy award winning produced Judith Sherman, with Steven Schick leading the ensemble and cast.
For more information about Inheritance, please go the project website.
Opera News: Critics Choice - The Edge of Silence
January 3, 2020
“…On The Edge of Silence,Narucki uncovers emotionally and vocally vulnerable spaces, drifting from melancholy sighs to exhausted murmurs that evaporate into mist. Her performance of the 1982 cycle Scenes from a Novel, a kind of modernist Winterreise scored for cimbalom, violin and double bass, paints a portrait of a heartbroken woman’s descent into despair. Her faraway tone and speechlike execution of Kurtág’s wandering arioso conjure the lonely, snow-dusted imagery of Rima Dalos’s Russian-language poetry…:
Read the review by Joe Cadagin here
New York Times: The 25 Best Classical Tracks of 2019
December 12, 2019
“This list of our critics’ favorite albums of the year, each represented by a single track, is a lot like the classical music scene: It might seem at first to be dominated by standards — alphabetical order, alas — but quickly reveals rarer treasures, from overlooked centuries-old works to fresh experiments. Enjoy.”
Included in the list: Seven Songs by Kurtag for voice and cimbalom from The Edge of Silence.
“These seven songs, a highlight in this album of Kurtag’s vocal works, pass in just over nine minutes: dark little pools of fervor, articulated by Ms. Narucki with precision and tenderness and accompanied by just the percussive cimbalom, played here with richly pianistic resonance by Nicholas Tolle. - Zachary Woolfe
Grammy Nomination: Best Classical Vocal Recording
November 20, 2019
Susan Narucki has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Solo Vocal Album category for her recording The Edge of Silence: Works for Voice by György Kurtág (AVIE Records AV2408).
Susan Narucki is one of today’s most committed advocates of the music of our time. She has a deep and lasting working relationship with Hungarian composer György Kurtág which dates back to 1986.
The Edge of Silence is a quintessential recorded collection of some of the composer’s most iconoclastic vocal works. In Susan’s words, “I have spent much of my life immersed in this repertoire, and it has become essential to the way I understand music; it is the heart of my practice as a musician.” Equally appreciative, Kurtág acknowledges Susan, “who sang so warmly, purely, so ‘integer’ these songs – with thanks and love.”
The American soprano is no stranger to Grammy Award recognition. She won a Grammy in 2000 as a featured performer in composer George Crumb’s Star-Child, which took the prize for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. She received a nomination in 2002 for Best Classical Vocal Performance, for Elliott Carter's Tempo e Tempi. In 2017, she earned a Latin Grammy Nomination for Cuatro Corridos, a chamber opera she co-created with Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi that addresses the subject of trafficking of women across the U.S.-Mexican border.
Since its release in August 2019, The Edge of Silence has received widespread international acclaim. “Vivid, profound and totally compelling,” was the verdict of The Guardian. MusicWeb International found the recording “treasurable,” and Luxembourg’s Pizzicato admired Narucki’s “wonderful wealth of colors and shades.” AllMusic weighed in, saying The Edge of Silence “may be regarded as definitive.”
The 2020 Grammy Awards will be presented in Los Angeles on January 26, 2020.
CRESCENDO MAGAZINE: Un Très Beau Disque.
November 4, 2019
“Il convient de rendre à Pierre Boulez ce qui lui appartient : il est le découvreur de la musique de György Kurtá . C’est lui, en tout cas, qui l’a fait largement connaître en 1981 en dirigeant les magnifiques Messages de feu Demoiselle Troussova avec l’Ensemble contemporain, alors que jusque-là György Kurtág, qui avait déjà pourtant beaucoup composé, n’avait obtenu aucune véritable audience ni la moindre distinction, y compris à Budapest où il n’était pour ainsi dire qu’un modeste professeur à l’Académie Franz Liszt. Depuis cette date, on n’arrête plus de jouer ses œuvres et, en particulier, celles pour la voix, à l’instar des sept opus que vient d’enregistrer l’excellente soprano américaine Susan Narucki dont le répertoire contemporain va d’Elliott Carter à Pascal Dusapin, en passant par George Crumb et Louis Andriessen (le fils de Hendrik Andriessen).
Tout l’art de György Kurtág se trouve comme condensé dans ces opus, mélange extrêmement raffiné de gravité et de dépouillement, de richesse harmonique et d’immatérialité, aux limites du silence, et même des abîmes. Dans les Sept chants op. 22, la voix est soutenue par le cymbalum, et d’une manière à la fois si étrange et si prenante qu’on a l’impression de parcourir des zones inconnues, impalpables. Le cymbalum qu’on entend aussi d’ailleurs dans Scènes d’un roman op. 19 et En souvenir d’un soir d’hiver op. 8, et dont les sonorités, qu’on pourrait qualifier de tziganes, confèrent à la voix de Susan Narucki un surcroît de mystère. Un très beau disque.”
Jean-Baptiste Baronian
Son 10 – Livret 9 – Répertoire 10 – Interprétation 10
Crescendo Magazine, Belgium www.crescendo-magazine.be PDF
MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL: “Treasurable”
October 18, 2019
“…Susan Narucki provides abundantly musical accounts of Kurtág sets that have in the main been recorded before. Notable among these is his Op 20, the peculiar cycle of unaccompanied vocal fragments set to the words of Attila József. These tiny statements (they defy the appellation ‘poetry’) are pregnant with depth and universality, while Narucki invests these naked, improbably powerful pieces (and the brief silences that separate them) with profound tact and riveting musicality. One work that was completely new to me was the set of Inscriptions Op 25, with piano accompaniment. The first of these, Flower is a setting of a fifteenth century text which is at once almost childlike; it’s delivered by Narucki as if she is projecting a rainbow of sadness. The third and final inscription incorporates words found on the grave of a young woman consumed by fever on the eve of the Second World War. It is devastating, its piano accompaniment quietly Ligetian. Narucki’s instrumental collaborators are beyond superb, and the Avie sound remains consistently cool and detailed, abundantly suitable for Kurtág’s elaborate creations…. “
- Richard Hanlon
DEutschlandFUNK - RADIO BROADCAST
October 13, 2019
The Edge of Silence was the subject of an in-depth, hour long broadcast on German Radio. To read an English summary of the broacast, please click.
More on The Edge of Silence
More thought provoking and positive responses to The Edge of Silence:
PIZZICATO (LuxEMBOURG) on The Edge of Silence
August 25, 2019
Die amerikanische Sopranistin Susan Narucki hat mit Donald Berman, Klavier, Curtis Macomber, Geige, Nicholas Tolle, Cimbalom und Kathryn Schulmeister, Kontrabass, eine ganze CD mit Vokalwerken von György Kurtag aufgenommen. Seit 1986 arbeitet sie eng mit dem ungarischen Komponisten zusammen und schreibt im Textheft: « Ich habe mich während einem Großteil meines Lebens in diese Musik versenkt, und sie ist für mein Verständnis von Musik von wesentlicher Bedeutung geworden. Es ist das Herzstück meiner Tätigkeit als Musikerin. » Ihr Album enthält Szenen aus einem Roman op. 19 nach Texten der russischen Dichterin Rimma Dalos, Sieben Lieder, Requiem für den Geliebten op. 26, Erinnerung an einen Winterabend op. 8, Drei Alte Inschriften op. 25, S.K.-Erinnerungsgeräusch sowie die Attila Jozsef-Fragmente op. 20. Die Interpretationen sind stimmlich wie instrumental ausdrucksvoll und intensiv, wobei Narucki mit einem wunderbaren Reichtum an Farben und Schattierungen aufwartet. Von Nachteil ist, dass die Zyklen immer in einem Track angeboten werden und das Suchen einzelner Lieder dadurch erschwert wird. (Avie 2408) – ♪♪♪♪
“Vivid, profound and totally compelling”
“The soprano Susan Narucki has been an unflinching champion of a huge range of contemporary music from both sides of the Atlantic for more than 30 years, but the vocal works of György Kurtág have always had a central place in her repertoire. They have become, she writes: “Essential to the way that I understand music … the heart of my practice as a musician.” Her collection of some of those pieces is based around two of Kurtág’s greatest vocal works, Scenes from a Novel Op 19, on texts by the Russian poet Rimma Dalos, completed in 1982, and the Attila József Fragments Op 20, from the previous year.
It’s music that demands the most scrupulous attention to detail. “Every piece of information on the page is essential” says Narucki, and her performances convey that sense of having overlooked nothing, while always preserving the expressive freedom and intensity that are such a vital part of Kurtág’s writing. As well as the major Dalos and József cycles, Narucki also sings the much more compact group of Dalos settings, Requiem for the Beloved Op 26, which along with the Three Old Inscriptions Op 25, have just piano accompaniment, and are the nearest things here to conventional songs. The four numbers in Requiem last barely five minutes, yet they map an emotional journey just as vividly as many cycles 10 times as long.
Narucki’s wonderfully subtle shading and control registers each twist and turn in the journeys of every one of these songs. The instrumentalists are equally acute and alert, with Nicholas Tolle’s cimbalom giving a unmistakably Hungarian tang to Scenes from a Novel and In Memory of a Winter Evening Op 8, as well as providing the only accompaniment to the Seven Songs of Op 22. The whole disc provides total immersion in Kurtág’s utterly distinctive world, one in which nothing is taken for granted and even the smallest detail is conferred with profound, totally compelling meaning. “ - Andrew Clements, The Guardian (U.K.)
August 2, 2019
CD Release: The Edge of Silence - Vocal Chamber Music of György Kurtág
Avie Records has announced the release of The Edge of Silence (AV2408), a recording by soprano Susan Narucki of vocal chamber music of György Kurtág. Ms. Narucki's colleagues on The Edge of Silence are her longtime collaborators Donald Berman, piano and Curtis Macomber, violin; along with Nicholas Tolle, cimbalom; and Kathryn Schulmeister, doublebass. The Edge of Silence includes Kurtág's seminal song-cycle Scenes from a Novel; two exquisite cycles for voice and piano, Three Old Inscriptions and Requiem for the Beloved; plus rarely heard works for voice and cimbalom, Seven Songs. The recording also includes Kurtág's S.K. Remembrance Noise for voice and violin, Attila József Fragments for solo soprano and the first recording of Kurtág's early work, A Twilight in Winter Recollected. The songs are sung in the original languages: Hungarian, Russian and German, with texts and translations included in the CD booklet.
Ms. Narucki's history with this music spans decades. She made her professional debut at the 1986 Ojai Festival in the West Coast premiere of Kurtág's Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova, with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by conductor Kent Nagano. Over the years, she has had the privilege of working with the composer himself in the interpretation of his music and has championed the composer's work in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, to London's Southbank Center, Amsterdam's Concertgebuow, and Rotterdam's De Doelen, plus festival appearances at Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, L.A. Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series, and countless times in recital in the U.S., Europe, Japan and China.
May 3, 2019
Soprano Susan Narucki and Friends Offer Probing New Music for the Voice at the La Jolla Athenaeum
“…there are signs that contemporary composers have rediscovered the allure of the human voice, and Thursday, May 2, San Diego New Music presented an engaging program of contemporary chamber works that featured the voice. Sagely curated and elegantly sung by soprano Susan Narucki, with some assistance from soprano Kirsten Ashley Wiest, the program fit the intimate ambience of the La Jolla Athenaeum perfectly… “
Read the complete review by Ken Herman
March 2019
Opera Magazine: Lei Liang’s Inheritance
“…Liang succeeds in evoking Sarah’s madness…This is a California-created opera that tells a uniquely Californian story - let’s hope it gets a chance to be heard at other, bigger houses in this state - and if all goes well, beyond.”
James C. Taylor Read the entire review.
December 24, 2018
san diego union tribune Year in review - 18 things we loved in the san diego arts scene in 2018
4. “Inheritance”
A joint presentation of ArtPower and UC San Diego Department of Music, this ambitious chamber opera was presented in late October at the Conrad Prebys Experimental Theater. Composer Lei Liang and soprano/producer Susan Narucki, both UCSD music professors, collaborated with librettist Matt Donovan and set designer Ligia Bouton. They developed a powerful exploration of gun violence through the complex prism of Sarah Winchester, the rifle heiress whose San Jose home has become a tourist attraction. UCSD’s Steven Schick led the talented ensemble, including six musicians and four vocalists, through Lei’s unique and compelling score. The focal point of it all was soprano Narucki, with her agile, expressive voice and her ability to convey the anguished and eccentric Winchester with compassion and verve. (Beth Wood)
December 12, 2018
nEW MUSIC BOX Retaking the Stage: What Artists Can Be In Our Society
By James Chute
Composer Lei Liang and soprano Susan Narucki were aware they were delving into a topic of immense importance in their new chamber opera, Inheritance, which deals with guns and gun violence. So they didn’t really need a reminder of the issue’s urgency when a gunman murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue gathered for Shabbat morning services on October 27, the day of the opera’s third and final performance at the University of California San Diego.
Photo: Farshid Bazmandegan
“That Saturday performance was very difficult, personally,” said Narucki, who produced the opera and sang the central role of Winchester Repeating Arms Company heiress Sarah Winchester. Narucki, like Liang, is on the UCSD music faculty and they had previously collaborated in the one-woman chamber opera Cuatro Corridos, whose four stories (set by Liang, Hilda Paredes, Arlene Sierra, and Hebert Vázquez) dealt with human trafficking.
“Can art make a difference?” Narucki asked. “I have to say, when we were going onto the stage Saturday evening, I thought, ‘What can make a difference?’ There’s a part of me that felt we’ve gone so far in the direction of just not hearing each other—we’ve normalized insanity—that nothing could make a difference.”
That moment of hopelessness passed, as Narucki possesses a strong core belief in music’s transformational potential. After a moment of silence in memory of the shooting victims, conductor Steven Schick gave the downbeat and the opera opened with a percussive volley that could have been mistaken for gunshots. “I think what ends up happening, and the whole cast felt this way, is there’s a kind of intensity you give to your performance in situations like that,” she said. “It’s difficult, but it seems like it’s a cry to try to break through that wall of indifference.”
Whether the piece—with a libretto by Matt Donovan, design by Ligia Bouton, and stage direction by Cara Consilvio—succeeded on that level can only be gauged by the individuals in the audience, but there was another wall that this unusually powerful work breeched in its immediate connection with a timely, complex, and controversial political and social issue: the apparent barrier between life and new music.
December 2, 2018
San diego story Berio “Circles”
By Ken Herman
“…Like Berberian, UC San Diego music faculty member soprano Susan Narucki has made a career interpreting challenging contemporary music, and her mastery of the daunting leaps, swoops, and contorted vowel sounds that abound in “Circles” was indeed thrilling. More to the point, her mastery of Berio’s heightened, post-Expressionist declamation of the text—“Circles” could be through of as the grandchild of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”—displayed all the panache of performance art wedded to confident, poised vocal technique.” Read the complete article
October 31, 2018
NEXT CITY | Can Engaging with Contemporary Social Issues Save the Opera?
By M. Sophia Newman
“…Meanwhile, on the West Coast, opera is taking an even more socially-engaged turn. From Oct. 24 to 27, a group at University of California San Diego mounted “Inheritance,” a new opera about Sarah Winchester, inheritor of the Winchester rifle company fortune and owner of a house said to be haunted by people killed with that brand of firearms.
Producer Susan Narucki says the idea was “to try to find a way to have the past speak to the present” by juxtaposing scenes from Winchester’s life with those of a modern school shooting. Co-creators Narucki, Lei Liang, Ligia Bouton, and Matt Donovan aimed for what she called “work that can be very disturbing and very provocative” to communicate horror at gun violence.
“It’s not the same thing as going to the Met,” Narucki says about the spectator experience, describing an intergenerational audience with “a lot of people who I don’t think have been to the opera before.” Although the formal program extended no farther than the opera itself, Narucki notes that “people stayed afterward in the performance space for about an hour to talk … They didn’t want to leave.”.
October 27, 2018
San Diego story Lei Liang’s Opera ‘Inheritance’ Premieres in La Jolla
By Ken Herman
“Upon the demise of William Wirt Winchester in 1881, his wife Sarah Winchester immediately became one of the world’s wealthiest women. With a sizable inheritance, a 50% interest in the New England Winchester rifle firm, and no children, Sarah had at her disposal more money than she could possibly spend in a single lifetime. For reasons shrouded in mystery and fantasy, Sarah invested her time and fortune in the unceasing expansion of her San Jose mansion, known today as the Winchester Mystery House. San Diego composer Lei Liang has taken the eccentric heiress and her strange obsessions and turned them into a one-act chamber opera, aptly titled Inheritance, which received its premiere last week in the Experimental Theatre at UC San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Music Center.
Central to the Sarah Winchester legend is her contact with the spirit world, and even today her mansion’s claim to be haunted by the ghosts of persons slain by Winchester rifles accounts for much of its allure to the tourist trade. Liang has built his opera around the personage of Sarah, magisterially acted and beautifully sung by fellow UC San Diego music faculty member Susan Narucki. In decidedly secondary roles, sopranos Kirsten Ashley Wiest and Hilary Jean Young, both graduate students at the university, portrayed ghosts and household servants, while Mexican baritone Josué Cerón sang the role of the Tour Guide.
Creating Sarah’s mysterious, haunted world fell to Liang’s eight-member chamber ensemble, deftly conducted by Steven Schick and dominated by percussion and wind instruments, although the composer did find room in this colorful octet for a harpsichord, played by virtuoso harpsichordist Takae Ohnishi, Liang’s wife. Quavering motifs, transparent textures, and sinuous lines that rarely resolve in expected places form Liang’s piquant sonic palette, whose gamut ran from startling, loud bass drum notes—rifle shots or mysteriously slamming doors, perhaps—and the ominous chortling from a pair of bass clarinets to evanescent ghostly glissandos plucked from the highest harpsichord strings.
But the opera revolves around Sarah and her obsession with death, notably the sudden death of her infant daughter—her only child—and the deaths caused by Winchester rifles, the conscience-troubling source of her wealth and comfort. For his soprano main character, Liang crafted a subtle parlando that blooms only after Sarah cautiously reveals herself as the opera progresses, following Matt Donovan’s poetic libretto. This vocal style suited Narucki admirably, allowing the more radiant, plush attributes of her gleaming soprano to shine. Usually I encounter Narucki performing with amazing agility some punishing, acrobatic avant-garde work that compromises the allure of her bel canto technique in order to navigate such thorny complexities. Not that Liang reverted to the Italianate vocal bravura of a Gian Carlo Menotti, of course, but the unhurried gentle curves of Liang’s lyrical style for the role of Sarah proved a gift to both singer and listener….”
October 18, 2018
New chamber opera ‘Inheritance’ explores grief through the story of Sarah Winchester and her bizarre home
By Beth Wood, San Diego Union-Tribune
How do you tell the story of a brilliant but conflicted woman who constantly added on rooms to her Victorian-style home? How do you display on stage the labyrinthine house, which was said to be haunted and later became a somewhat garish tourist site? And, most importantly, how do you explore the issue of gun violence through music, voice, beauty, compassion and humor?
The answers will be revealed in the world premiere of “Inheritance,” a groundbreaking chamber opera co-presented by ArtPower and the UC San Diego Music Department on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
One short answer is that it required a three-year collaboration among four accomplished artists in different fields. That, plus a small troop of financial and hands-on supporters.
The opera is based on the life and legend of Sarah Winchester, the widow of rifle magnate William Wirt Winchester, who died in 1881. According to folklore, she was advised by a psychic to outsmart the ghosts in their San Jose home, now called the Winchester Mystery House, by continuously adding on rooms.
Composer Lei Liang and Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki, both UC San Diego music professors, recruited the married couple of poet/writer Matt Donovan and visual artist Ligia Bouton. Donovan, Liang and their families spent almost a year in Rome when the two men were awarded fellowships at the American Academy there.
“Personally, I like to work with a circle of friends,” said Narucki, who will portray Winchester and is “Inheritance’s” producer. “Lei told me about these wonderful people. I was drawn to the idea that both were new to opera. It’s interesting to work with people who have a fresh take on the genre.
“We all learned a lot from each other. We brought different strengths and allowed it to go in directions it might not have gone.”
October 18, 2018
UCSD News Center ‘Inheritance’ Chamber Opera Uses Art and Music to Address a Complex Social Issue
By Anthony King
Using legendary story of Sarah Winchester, Department of Music professors stage timely world-premiere about gun violence in America
Moved by headlines of yet another mass shooting in the United States, a team of musicians and artists felt it was time to take action. And while there are many ways to address an issue that increasingly touches every life, they did what most artists would do. They turned to their craft.
“It’s such a complicated topic, gun violence in America,” said Susan Narucki, an award-winning singer, professor in the UC San Diego Department of Music and producer of “Inheritance,” the new chamber opera that receives its world premiere on campus Oct. 24.
“We are in a time when people are talking past one another. How can we have a conversation about such a difficult topic, which impacts our society in such a significant way?” she said. “As artists, we can and need to be part of that conversation, and this is a way to do it.”
“Inheritance” uses the legendary story of Sarah Winchester—the enigmatic heir to the Winchester rifle fortune who, as history tells it, was haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles—to initiate a deep, thoughtful look at a very contemporary issue.
Friend and longtime collaborator Lei Liang, a world-renowned composer in the Department of Music who was recently named Qualcomm Institute’s inaugural Research Artist in Residence, was quickly on board with writing the score for a project of this scope. As parent of a young child, school shootings in particular became front of mind in the early stages of developing the opera.
“I feel liberated that I’m dealing with issues that are important to me,” he said. “Issues that I can create an artistic expression for, inviting people to have an experience in each performance so that it gives them more space to imagine, to contemplate and more space to perhaps face themselves.”
October 12, 2018
TV UNAM - John cage songbooks - festival vertice
September 27, 2018
UC San DIEGO NEWS CENTER - CHAMBER OPERA Addressing GUN violence to receive world premiere at UC San Diego
By Anthony King - Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki, “Inheritance” uses legendary story of Sarah Winchester to spark discussion about guns in today’s culture.
Produced by Grammy Award-winning soprano and Department of Music faculty member Susan Narucki presents the world-premiere chamber opera “Inheritance” at UC San Diego, using the legendary story of Sarah Winchester to address gun violence in the United States.
Narucki will portray Winchester, the eccentric widow and rifle-company heir who was self-imprisoned in her California mansion, haunted by the spirits of those killed by the firearms that made her family’s fortune. “Inheritance” interweaves Winchester’s story with events from contemporary life, asking complex questions about complicity, atonement and gun control in our society.
September 16, 2018
Inheritance - A top ten pick in San Diego u-T Fall Arts Preview
San Diego Union Tribune Arts Writer Beth Wood lists Inheritance as a pick of the Fall Arts Season. We are honored to be listed alongside some of San Diego’s premiere arts venues and organizations. Tickets for the October 24, 2018 premiere are on sale now.
September 12, 2018
“Inheritance” examines gun violence via a multimedia Chamber opera
By Jeff Terich, San Diego City Beat
Opera is an art form steeped in tragedy. Suicide. Infidelity. Tuberculosis. Murderous, cuckolded clowns. Yet it’s not often that those narratives stretch beyond the stage and into the long-term socio-political implications of those tragedies.
Inheritance—a multimedia chamber opera being staged Oct. 24, 26 and 27 at UC San Diego’s Prebys Experimental Theater—is a work whose composers seek to change that approach. With music composed by Lei Liang and libretto (text) by Matt Donovan—led by music director Steven Schick and featuring soprano Susan Narucki—Inheritance spotlights America’s epidemic of gun violence via the story of Sarah Winchester. The widow of William Wirt Winchester, whose namesake was one of the earliest mass-produced repeating rifles, Sarah Winchester became famous for construction of the Winchester Mystery House, a curious estate built to confuse the spirits that haunted her.
“In the opening scene, Sarah Winchester is already old, sitting in her house where she’s trying to trap the ghosts that haunt her,” Liang says of the production. “The music begins very dramatically. And these are sounds that only Sarah can hear. She’s haunted by the deaths caused by her late husband’s rifle.”
This isn’t the first opera to address contemporary social issues from Liang and Narucki. The two artists previously worked together on Cuatro Corridos, an opera dealing with human trafficking that was nominated for a Latin Grammy award. Both of them have a similar outlook on opera, in that it should be able to transcend entertainment.
“We all share the idea that new music shouldn’t be separate from social issues,” Liang says. “It can serve the purpose of giving the voiceless a voice. “These issues are so urgent. We wanted to respond to them in a humane, sophisticated way.”
Narucki adds, however, that the key to a successful modern opera is thinking outside of the expected norms. A performance that’s meant to be staged in a smaller venue, as Inheritance is, can open up more possibilities and thus more people hearing its message.
“Over the past five years, more and more people are figuring out how to create stories relevant to social issues that connect past and present,” Narucki says. “Opera’s been around for 500 years, and operas that are successful on a smaller scale are more fluid. Making every production to be heard in a 3,000-seat auditorium is not always financially viable.”
Even though Inheritance isn’t being housed in a large auditorium, it’s still intended to leave an impact, not just because of its underlying message but because of its production. In addition to Narucki, the production features music performed by clarinetist Anthony Burr, bassist Mark Dresser, guitarist Pablo Gomez, harpsichordist Takae Onishi, and trumpeter Stephanie Richards, and art design by Ligia Bouton, including a backdrop of the famed Winchester Mystery House itself.
The creators of Inheritance promise a multimedia experience that steps outside of what can be expected of an operatic production. But Narucki has her own specific hopes for what kind of impression the work leaves on the audience.
“If one person sees this and is moved to rethink possibilities of how we experience and interact with the world, then I think we’ve succeeded.”