At the beginning of next month, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) will conclude its subscription season with a program entitled Myth & Memory: Berio Folk Songs with New Companions. Folk Songs is the title of a cycle of eleven songs that Luciano Berio composed for the American mezzo Cathy Berberian. She was married to Berio between 1950 and 1964, the latter being the year in which he composed his folk song arrangements. (She continued to collaborate with Berio after their divorce.)
Visiting contralto Emily Marvosh (photograph by Tatiana Daubek, courtesy of LCCE)
Those arrangements involved rather rich instrumentation for chamber music, consisting of flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet, harp, viola, cello, and percussion (two players). The sources for the songs included the United States (arrangements by John Jacob Niles), Italy (including Sicily), France (with particular attention to the Auvergne region), Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Contralto Emily Marvosh will join the LCCE musicians to perform this collection.
She will be followed by LCCE soprano Nikki Einfeld, who will present a set of “new folk song companions.” Composers Linda Catlin Smith, Hiroya Miura, Chris Castro, Seong Ae Kim, and Ingrid Stözel will each contribute two songs to the program, all of which will be receiving their world premieres. Einfeld will then conclude the program with Carl Schimmel’s “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” which had been scheduled for its world premiere on March 9, 2020 but was cancelled due to COVID-19. This is a setting of a chapter from Howard L. Chace’s book Anguish Languish, now out of print but available from Amazon.com at collector’s-item prices. The text only makes sense when it is read aloud. For example, Chase describes the story that Schimmel set to music as a “ladle furry starry toiling udder warts—warts welcher altar girdle deferent firmer once inner regional virgin.”
The San Francisco performance of this program will take place at 7:30 p.m. on June 6. The venue will be the San Francisco Conservatory of Music building at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. Tickets are being sold for $30 with a $10 rate for students. A Web page has been created for purchasing both categories of tickets.
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