Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons: All of Me

Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons: All of Me

I sang very briefly with a jazz quartet in college, and while I love jazz and enjoy the challenge of improvisation, I’ve always been terrified of scat.  When our group decided to jam on “All of Me,” I relied my opera singer skill of memorization to recall the amazing...
Hector Berlioz: Le spectre de la rose

Hector Berlioz: Le spectre de la rose

“Le spectre de la rose” from Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights) is both delicate and grand, one of those songs that really sticks with you. The ghost of a rose, plucked and worn by a woman at a ball, appears at her bedside. The rose fills her room with its...
Manuel de Falla: Soneto a Córdoba

Manuel de Falla: Soneto a Córdoba

Steve brought “Soneto a Córdoba” to me as a possibility for our Lorca program (since de Falla was one of Lorca’s mentors), and despite never having been, I was instantly transported to southern Spain. This song is an ode to Córdoba, a town in Andalusia where the poet...
Maurice Ohana:  Tango el mariquita

Maurice Ohana: Tango el mariquita

Federico Lorca struggled with his sexuality for much of his short life. No wonder. It was the inevitable fate of a passionate, uninhibited, demonstrative gay man living in a repressive, homophobic culture. While he had deep emotional attachments to a number of women,...
Federico Mompou:  El niño mudo

Federico Mompou: El niño mudo

In 1956, two great Catalan composers, Federico Mompou and Xavier Montsalvatge, collaborated on a project for Barcelona’s Liceu Theater. They wanted to make a ballet adaptation of a Lorca play, The Love of Don Peremplín and Belisa in the Garden. Though not considered...