Full program details are now available for the two Schwabacher Recital Series concerts that will take place next month. I have to confess that, in the context of both personal curiosity and personal favorites, I have far more than one dog in this hunt. Particularly where the “novelty factor” is involved, one might even say that I have a litter of puppies. It is also worth nothing that both of these programs have been organized into sections, and there are signs that considerable thought has gone into how the repertoire has been grouped to form those sections.
The first of next month’s recitals will be a program of solo songs performed by mezzo Ashley Dixon. Her accompanist will be pianist Kseniia Polstiankina Barrad. It will be clear from her very first selection that Dixon is not interested in a recital devoted entirely to “the usual suspects.” That song is “Triste está la infanta” (the infanta is gloomy), the first song in Alberto Hemsi’s Opus 18, the fourth in a set of ten volumes entitled Coplas Sefardies (Sephardic songs), published in Thessaloniki (in Greece) in 1932.
Hemsi’s ethnomusicological study of Sephardic melodies began as a result of inquiries into his family origins, and his research paralleled that of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in Eastern Europe. He could only collect words set to melodies. Coplas Sefardies was the overall title of the piano accompaniments he wrote for those songs. Baritone Cantor Assaf Levitin and pianist Naaman Wagner recorded all of these songs as part of the three-CD release entitled Coplas Sefardies.
Taken as a whole, Dixon’s recital will focus on music from France and the Iberian peninsula. None of the selections will be sung in German (or, for that matter, English). Thus, the set that begins with Hemsi will continue with Maurice Ravel (“Chanson espagnole”), Franz Liszt setting a text in French (“Comment, disaient-ils”), and Reynaldo Hahn (“L’heure exquise”).
The second set will be framed by two of the songs that Manuel de Falla collected as his Siete canciones populares españolas (seven Spanish folk songs). These will serve as “bookends” for three songs by Carlos Guastavino, Jesús Guridi, and Alberto Ginastera, respectively. (Guridi was Basque, while Guastavino and Ginastera were both Argentinian.)
The third set will shift from Iberian sources to the French. All of the composers are likely to be familiar to most of the audience: Cécile Chaminade, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Ernest Chausson, and Francis Poulenc. The final set will begin with the five songs by Joaquín Turina collected for his Opus 19 entitled Poema en forma de canciones (poem in the form of songs). The program will then conclude with “La Mort d’Ophélie” (the death of Ophelia), the second of three songs that Hector Berlioz collected as his Opus 18 entitled Tristia (sorrows).
This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, April 6. Like this month’s offering, the performance will take place in the Taube Atrium Theater, part of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, which is located in the Veterans Building (on the fourth floor) at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. General admission will be $30. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through an event page on the San Francisco Opera Web site. Note that it is possible to select the option of Wheelchair Accessible seats for both performance venues. 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.
The second program next month will feature three vocalists: soprano Elisa Sunshine, baritone Timothy Murray, and bass Stefan Egerstrom. They will be accompanied by pianist Andrew King, and the program will be divided into two sets. The first of those sets will begin with another round of music that has piqued my curiosity for quite some time. It will consist of a selection of seven art songs composed by Jean Sibelius during different periods in his life. All of the texts will be in Finnish. Those songs will then be followed by Try Me, Good King, a song cycle by Libby Larsen consisting of five songs, each named after a wife of the English King Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard. (Catherine Parr, who outlived Henry, is not included in the cycle.) The second half of the program will present works by composers from three different nations: England (Jonathan Dove and Cyril Scott), Austria (Erich Wolfgang Korngold), and France (Poulenc).
This program will also begin at 7:30 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, April 27. The performance will again take place in the Taube Atrium Theater. Ticket prices will be the same but with a different event page for online purchases.
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