MahlerFest XXXIII was to include an amazingly talented group of singers – April Fredrick, Brennen Guillory, Teresa Karcher, Stacey Rishoi, and Matthew Sharp. To showcase these performers we had planned an afternoon soiree at a private home in Boulder. (the original plan is still available here, if you are curious). In its place, we are offering a number of song cycles from these singers and others.
MAHLER Three Songs
- Des Knaben Wunderhorn – Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Where the splendid trumpets sound)
- Ruckert Lieder – 2. Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft (I breathed the breath of blossoms red)
- Ruckert Lieder – 3. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (O garish world, long since thou hast lost me)
Michelle DeYoung, one of the most sought-after Mahler singers on the world stage, performs three songs from her home in Colorado. Text and translations are available – Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft, and Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.
Program notes for Des Knaben Wunderhorn from MahlerFest XIV.
Program notes for Rückert Lieder from MahlerFest XVI (scroll to page 12).
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To be released on Thursday, May 14, 2020 at 3:30 PM MDT.
PHILIP SAWYERS Songs of Loss and Regret
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April Fredrick, Soprano
Philip Sawyers is our visiting composer this season. His tone poem, Hommage to Kandinsky, was scheduled to be paired with Mahler’s Second Symphony and will be available on Friday as part of the Virtual MahlerFest. After the premiere of this song cycle the Hereford Times said, “Sawyers presented us with a cycle of sombre, vaguely Mahlerian settings of poems, chiefly on the themes of war and death…Sawyers’ piece was beautifully written in the main, and sung with a blend of tragedy and rapture by the American soprano April Fredrick….” Fredrick has since recorded the cycle with the English Symphony Orchestra under the baton of our own Kenneth Woods. Here, she performs it after recovering from a bout with the Corona virus from her home with Michael Karcher-Young, Colorado MahlerFest’s Assistant Conductor and Pianist, at the piano.
Blog post – Philip Sawyers on his Songs of Loss and Regret is here.
April Fredrick introduces “A Shropshire Lad”
Ahead of her recital performance of Philip Sawyers’ cycle “Songs of Loss and Regret,” April Fredrick, soprano takes listeners deep inside the workings and meanings of the first song, “A Shropshire Lad.” It’s a really engaging listener’s guide to a work that has been hailed as “a masterpiece” by ClassicalSource and Musical Opinion.
“Sawyers’s song-cycle is a masterpiece: I have no hesitation in claiming that on just the one hearing…and a considerable compliment was paid to the composer by the exceptional April Fredrick who sang superbly throughout without a score. For an artist of this quality to memorise the music is itself an indication of her view of the work’s stature. The ESO and Woods were flawless partners.” Robert Matthew-Walker, Classical Source.
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Full Performance – Available Now!
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This video is available now!
ERIC McELROY The Fetch: Songs of the Uncanny
This song cycle, by American composer and pianist Eric McElroy, is based on poems by Gregory Leadbetter that examine music’s ability to reawaken the mystical in the ordinary – to unleash what Leadbetter calls ‘a sense between the skin and something understood’. This performance features April Frederick, soprano, and Eric McElroy, piano.
Composed in 2019, “The Fetch” is a song-cycle by composer-pianist Eric McElroy that sets five poems by poet Gregory Leadbetter. In this unique poetic and musical collaboration, McElroy and Leadbetter celebrate the ability of art to reawaken the mystical in the ordinary – to unleash what Leadbetter calls ‘a sense between the skin and something understood’.
At the song-cycle’s core is a confrontation between experience and the adequacy of language to encapsulate it. Its first song proclaims the power of music (‘the best of speech’) to reawaken pre-historic states in which nature is read in mystical dialogue with the conscious self.
Three subsequent songs chronicle encounters with the uncanny in scenes of increasing disorientation. A walk in the woods traces an occult path between levels of perception; a bleeding statue ‘makes the livid/brink of perfect stillness dance’; another statue, gagged and rewilded by vegetation, emits disquieting laughter through the surrounding trees. This gradual unwinding of reality crosses a threshold into altered states of knowing that finds affirmation in the fusion of exactitude and indeterminacy.
In the final song, the speaker recognizes that, while the attempt to translate experience into words shares an oblique relation with lived truth, language can nevertheless invoke, in its gift, truths at once pre- and post-verbal. “The Fetch” is an encounter with the mystery of sound and word.
fetch, n.2: the apparition, double, or wraith of a living person. All Music © 2020 by Eric McElroy. All Rights Reserved. All Poems © Gregory Leadbetter and reproduced by permission of the publishers from “The Fetch”, published by Nine Arches Press, 2016. Nine Arches Press are supported by public funding through Arts Council England. www.NineArchesPress.com
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To be released on Thursday, May 14, 2020 at 3:30 PM MDT.
MANUEL de FALLA Siete Canciones Populares Sspañolas
(Seven Spanish Folksongs)
Teresa Karcher, mezzo soprano, and Michael Karcher-Young, piano, perform the first three movements from this popular de Falla’s suite.
From Teresa Karcher:
It is my opinion that de Falla’s song cycle is the Spanish ‘Frauenliebe und Leben’ and although I haven’t found any explicit corroboration to saying that this is the tale of a love story from beginning to end in any of my research, this is how these songs make sense to me. In contrast to Schumann’s song cycle, in Siete Canciones some songs are told by a narrator and others are clearly coming from the young girl in question. The life of one girl, the life of a thousand girls, growing up somewhere in a Spanish village with all eyes on her comings and goings.
In the three songs we offer, we have shown the third song ‘Asturiana’ in a different frame as it is the first time the protagonist comes in, the first and second songs being narrated by different characters in the village. I imagine older ladies in the village talking about a fine cloth that has been stained and will consequently be sold for less – not a subtle metaphor for a girl having lost her virginity outside of wedlock. This is followed by the ‘Seguidilla Murciana’ as told by the local muleteers. They are warning to not throw stones if you live in glass houses, yet at the same time comparing a woman’s inconstancy to a peseta coin that has been passed from hand to hand, it’s face value being erased in the process such that no one wants it. By the time the Asturian lament comes in, the pressures of the village scrutiny have gotten to the protagonist and she seeks solace in nature.
Text and translations are available here.
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Check back on Thursday as we hope to add more performances.
Click here to view the full 2020 Virtual Colorado MahlerFest schedule.
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