Starch & Glitter to Perform at Red Poppy

Poster image for the concert being discussed, based on an original oil painting by Delphyne V.

Starch & Glitter calls itself a concert series that “combines fashion with classical singing: celebrating beauty, diversity, and uniqueness while developing community in an intimate environment.” The idea was conceived in 2015 by bass-baritone Waiton Farrell; and the offerings are “moveable feasts,” which tend to be hosted in intimate venues that reflect parlor or salon settings. The next program will be presented tomorrow night; so a heads-up seemed in order.

In honor of the Halloween season, the title of the program will be REAPER MADNESS, which honors the season with a particularly imaginative bit of punning. The concert is being described as “a gleeful reflection on death and insanity, and how the end comes for us all.” The program will include a performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s best-known song cycle, Songs and Dances of Death. Selections from Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd will also be presented, along with selected vocal compositions by Ned Rorem, Carl Loewe, Henry Purcell, Olivier Messiaen, Jacques Brel, and many others. Farrell himself will be one of the vocalists, joined by soprano Elsa Bishop. Piano accompaniment will be provided by Astghik Sakanyan.

The performance will begin at 7 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday, October 24). The venue will be the Red Poppy Art House, located at 2698 Folsom Street on the southwest corner of 23rd Street. General admission will be $40. This will include not only the concert but also unlimited champagne and access to our meet-and-greet reception after the performance, featuring Chantal Guillon macarons, and other delicious treats. There will also be VIP admission for $75, which includes priority seating and a pre-concert chat with the performers. Advance purchase is being handled through an Eventbrite event page.

WUNDERHORN Influences

We are so used to associating Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the massive anthology of folk poetry collected and edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, with Gustav Mahler that we tend to overlook just how many composers drew upon it as a resource.  Its Wikipedia entry tried to account for many of these composers in a rough chronological ordering that runs from Carl Maria von Weber through Alexander von Zemlinsky.  Even more interesting may be the listing in The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive, which tries to account for just how many of these songs have been set by at least one composer but begins with the disclaimer that the list is incomplete.  Even so, it runs to 168 entries, ordered alphabetically by poem title but beginning with ten listed as “Unknown Title.”

There are any number of games one may play with this list.  Today I decided to use Firefox Find to peruse the list for poems set by Johannes Brahms.  There were several interesting discoveries.  Some of the poems were set multiple times, which was not particularly surprising.  More interesting, however, may be that there was only one poem that had been set by both Brahms and Gustav Mahler.  Given the size of the anthology, this may have been mere coincidence;  or it may be that this particular poem, “Zu Straßburg auf der Schanz,” was set by a total of seven composers.  Curiously, there is only one entry for Carl Loewe (listed as “J. Loewe” for his full name, Johann Carl Gottfried Loewe), given that Mahler was so interested in Loewe.  However, that poem is certainly an important one for Mahler lovers, even if Mahler used a slightly different version of the text.  Loewe’s version is entitled “Der Kukuk;”  but Mahler used a longer version of the text under the title “Lob des hohen Verstands.”

The real surprise for me, however, was that Brahms’ best known song actually comes from the Wunderhorn collection.  This is the “Wiegenlied,” the fourth song in the Opus 40 collection of five.  These days we know it best as “Brahms’ Lullaby.”  Few probably know that it has words at all, and even fewer know what those words are!

Discovering Carl Loewe

One of the more interesting features of the Great EMI Recordings box for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is the opportunity to provides to get to know the songs of Carl Loewe.  There are only five included in the collection, recorded over a series of sessions in September of 1967.  However, Loewe made his mark on the history of music, even if that mark was not established until after his death in 1869.

I first encountered Loewe in a recital that Eugene Brancoveneau gave in May of 2010.  He decided to couple the familiar setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Erlkönig” by Franz Schubert with one of the same take by Loewe.  What makes the latter significant emerged in the report I wrote of this concert for Examiner.com:

While the Schubert setting is the more familiar (if not the most familiar of his songs), Loewe's is particularly enlightening when we realize that Gustav Mahler studied his work scrupulously before undertaking any of his own song settings.  Thus, the attentive listener will not be surprised to find that the opening gesture of Loewe's setting provides a tantalizing foretaste of "Ich hab' ein glühend Messer" from the Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen;  and the overall rhetoric of the setting anticipates many of Mahler's Wunderhorn songs.

I had the good fortune to chat a bit with Brancoveanu after I had filed this report and mentioned this bit of influence that spanned about half a century.  Brancoveanu accepted the possible validity of the hypothesis, and further support can be found for it in the other Loewe selection in the EMI collection.