Susan Narucki Soprano

The Light That Is Felt | Songs of Charles Ives
New World Records 80680-2 (2008)

Susan Narucki, soprano Donald Berman, piano

Editor's Choice - BBC Music Magazine, - Highest rating: 5 Stars

"...the disc represents a fertile meeting of minds belonging to two eloquent champions of 20th century American music...So often Ives demands an unselfconscious simplicity not all singers can muster. Susan Narucki knows how not to over-gild - never rending maudlin the richthread of nocturne and remembrance which runs through the artfully-plotted programme. The oppressed fragility of "Like a Sick Eagle" is something special on a very special disc indeed."
Paul Riley - BBC Music Magazine

"There's probably no finer introduction to Ives' songs, or indeed his output as a whole".
Andy Hamilton - Wire

"The collaboration of the splendid Susan Narucki, a soprano of round and luminous timbre and her conscientious accompanist Donald Berman, shows limitless musicality."
Diverdi - Elisa Rapado

"Ne possiamo ascoltare una scelta non cosi minima nella magnifica interpretazione della soprano Susan Narucki, accompangnata da Donald Berman."
Piercarlo Poggio - BLOW UP (Italy)

"As interesting as intense is this selection of Charles Ives' songs extracted from the compilation '114 Songs' published by the same composer in 1922... The songs on this disc belong to every era, since his youth in Yale until the end of his inspiration in 1927, and address different themes: bucolic, urban, and sentimental. However, they all share the same spirit: the atonality offers an sense of mystery that mixes with some typical American melodies, giving a result of great modernity. The tandem formed by Susan Narucki and Donald Berman is fully involved in the project, with the security of someone who know what he is doing and with a great synthesis between them. The result: a good mixture of brief songs of intense music and words as evocative as the photography that illustrates the CD."
Opera Actual (Spain)

"Under the Influence, or Providing It" - The New York Times, Jan 16, 2009

International Record Review - February 2009

The Light That is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives reflects Susan Narucki and Donald Berman’s lifelong interest in the music of Charles Ives. The twenty-seven songs on this disc range from some of Ives’ best known (Songs My Mother Taught Me, The Housatonic at Stockbridge) to the lesser known settings of Italian poets (August, September, December) and also includes General William Booth Enters Into Heaven. The performances were informed by the critical edition of Ives Songs by the late Wiley Hitchcock and the project was supported by grants from the Aaron Copland Fund For Recorded Music and The Ives Society.

Aaron Jay Kernis
(2007) Koch 7667

Susan Narucki, soprano
Donald Berman, piano
Aaron Jay Kernis, conductor

“Soprano Susan Narucki, pianist Donald Berman and the other musicians on this recording offer satisfying accounts of this difficult, serious but wonderfully expressive music......Narucki has the smarts and complete investment they require. There seem to be no heights she is unafraid to scale; her ability to create line over the angular melodies is enviable She also has compelling richness to her voice that gives her access to plenty of colors…. these songs which invite performers to strut their personality -- a task Narucki and Berman can do handsomely." - Opera News

"Kernis is an extraordinary melodist and a master of lush, delicately Romantic harmonies, and when sets out to seduce a listener, there's no resisting him - especially with soprano Susan Narucki's lustrous tones to seal the deal. Simple Songs," which Narucki introduced in San Francisco in 1999, remains a beautiful tour de force, with its delicate instrumental writing and heart-stopping Mahlerian finale." - San Francisco Chronicle

With Donald Berman, pianist.

Gramophone An extensive and enjoyable collection of American music nurtured in Rome. 2009

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.

(2005) New World Records 80629-2
Four songs of Carl Ruggles

Susan Narucki, soprano
Donald Berman, piano

"Long before the days when assistant professors wrote tone rows for tenure, American modernism was something worth fighting for. And perhaps no one fought harder than Carl Ruggles (1876-1971), a hardscrabble New England eccentric (and friend of Charles Ives) whose compositional technique was so rudimentary that a lifetime of labor resulted in only twelve published works, just enough for a single concert.

For Ruggles lovers, that has never been enough, and the pianist Donald Berman has slaked their thirst with "The Uncovered Ruggles" (New World Records), premiere recordings of sketches painstakingly realized by Berman's teacher John Kirkpatrick (such as a surprisingly winsome "Valse Lente") as well as persuasive performances of familiar works (like the "Evocations," for piano, or the song "Toys," lovingly rendered by the soprano Susan Narucki). Berman is an artist both forceful and discreet: he easily provides the big tone that Ruggles's arching lines of dissonant counterpoint require, yet he is also sensitive to the poignantly timeless quality that these strange works have."
- Russell Platt, The New Yorker

Robert Heppener
(1996) Donemus/CV 48

Susan Narucki, soprano
Sepp Grotenhuis, piano

In their lyrical passion, the poems in this song cycle - taken from Pound’s Ripostes - point far ahead of their time (1912) to ours: a time of great crowding, overpopulation and stress. A time in which one not only desires with a certain sense of nostalgia, but also, with a certain sense of rebelliousness, yearns for space, rest and solitude. Heppener’s music is marked by keen expressivity and expansiveness in the vocal line, and a great sense of spaciousness.

Charles Ives
(2001) Decca 466 841-2

Susan Narucki, soprano
Sanford Sylvan, baritone
Alan Feinberg, piano
Richard Bernas, conductor
Music Projects/London

Artistic Quality 10 / Sound Quality 10 - Classics Today.com

“As if we need any more evidence of Charles Ives' unconventional ideas and composing techniques, this excellent recording reminds us that for him, a song was less a form and more a wide-open vehicle for free expression--whether spontaneous, undeveloped personal thoughts or settings of the most refined poetic utterances. But no matter how you analyze or try to define Ives' motives and methods, you have to be impressed by his way with a text--from his own (The See'r; The New River; Remembrance) to those of revered writers such as Lord Byron (who wrote the poem from which the disc's title is taken), John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, John Milton, William Wordsworth, or Robert Underwood Johnson. As conductor Richard Bernas explains, "Ives' songs are an essential key to his musical imagination, not just in vocal but in the most extravagant instrumental terms, when they are transformed into the Sets for Orchestra." And therein lies the genius of this recording: to place the songs alongside the orchestral versions that often preceded them. Many listeners will not be aware that Ives wrote a number of instrumental works that he later set to texts; he also turned original songs into instrumental pieces. Both types are represented here and it's fascinating to compare the related compositions that also stand perfectly well on their own.

The orchestral sets are expertly performed by Bernas and his Music Projects/London ensemble, and likewise, the vocal versions are given high-class attention by soprano Susan Narucki and baritone Sanford Sylvan, with Alan Feinberg at the piano. We can only marvel at (and reach for the repeat button following) a masterpiece such as the song The Last Reader, an Oliver Wendell Holmes text set with uncommon sensitivity and evocative piano colors and shadings. And what can you say about Charlie Rutlage, a two and one half minute dramatic tour de force about "another good cowpuncher" who's "gone to meet his fate"--except that it's perfect, and not a second too long or too short? Similarly, the disc's final song, a beautiful yet almost painfully brief "remembrance" of the composer's father (with a text by Ives himself), leaves you wanting more but realizing that in 53 seconds Ives has said all that needs be said. This is a very special and memorable recording that deserves priority not only on listeners' purchase lists but also among citations for discs of the year. The sound is vibrant, detailed, and brightly-colored, suitably intimate for the songs and appropriately full-bodied and spacious for the orchestral pieces.”
- David Vernier, Classics Today.com

Beth Wiemann
(2004) Albany Troy 675

Susan Narucki, soprano
Christopher Oldfather, piano
Beth Wiemann, clarinet

“Strong singing is provided by soprano Susan Narucki, with attractively full sound, felicitous execution and solid diction.”
- New Music Connoisseur

Beth Wiemann was raised in Burlington, Vermont and studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin and Princeton University. She teaches composition and clarinet at the University of Maine, and splits her time between Maine and Massachusetts, where her husband, composer David Rakowski, teaches at Brandeis University.

On this compilation of works for voice, clarinet, piano and electronics, Beth Wiemann brings together in compelling fashion three important facets of her life as a composer: a fascination with setting words, broad experience as an active performer of her own music and that of her colleagues, and an ongoing interest in the incorporation into her work of electronic and digital technology. Wiemann has been fascinated for years with the already heightened speech of poetry and its translation into the still more heightened speech of song. Among her earliest musical memories is that of hearing original cast recordings of Broadway musicals played in her home as a child. Unlike a number of composers of her generation, the Broadway idiom has exerted a far greater influence on her than later pop and rock styles, though not in an immediately obvious way. While genuinely admiring the craftsmanship of such composers for the stage as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Bernstein and Sondheim, however, she has not sought to introduce superficial characteristics of their styles into her music in any literal sense. Instead, she has cultivated a harmonically subtle, more chromatic and less obviously tonally grounded pitch language. In keeping with that tendency, she is often drawn to poetry that is intimate and conversational in tone or concerned with aspects of everyday life.

In travels to artists' colonies over the years she has had the good fortune to meet and befriend a number of poets, who often provide her with new material for musical setting. Most of this disc consists of selections from Weimann's collection Simple Songs, a project she began in 1990. . Over time, Wiemann added other songs to the collection as she came across poetry that interested her. The latest song from the collection that appears on this disc is "Seamstress" composed in 2001.