Schwabacher: Two Vocalists and Two Pianists

Tenor Michael John Butler and Baritone Olivier Zerouali (courtesy of the Merola Opera Program and the San Francisco Opera Center)

The annual Schwabacher Recital Series, presented jointly by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Center and the Merola Opera Program, will continue in a little less than two week’s time. This month’s program will present tenor Michael John Butler and baritone Olivier Zerouali; and it will be the second of the three programs presented this season. Accompaniment will be provided by two pianists: Julian Garvue and Ji Youn Lee.

The program will present four song cycles. The oldest (and probably most familiar) of these will be Robert Schumann’s Opus 48 Dichterliebe (a poet’s love), setting sixteen of the poems that Heinrich Heine collected in his Lyrisches Intermezzo. Francis Poulenc will be represented by two cycles. The program will begin with Le Travail du Peintre (the work of the painter), providing “musical portraits” of the artists Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Jacques Villon. The other cycle collects six songs under the title Calligrammes. The remaining cycle on the program will be I Was There: Five Poems of Walt Whitman by Lee Hoiby. The program will conclude with the last three of the four songs that Richard Strauss collected for his Opus 27.

This performance will take place in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall on Wednesday, March 19, beginning at 7:30 p.m. This venue is on the eleventh floor of the Bowes Center, which is located at 200 Van Ness Avenue. General admission will be $30. Tickets may be purchased online through an event page on the San Francisco Opera Web site. Note that wheelchair accessible seating is not an option. The telephone number for the Box Office is 864-3330. In addition, subject to availability, student rush tickets will go on sale at 7 p.m. at the reduced rate of $15. There is a limit of two tickets per person, and valid identification must be shown.