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Hazel Dickens: Pretty Bird
Today, I wanted to share a song by one of my favorite folk artists, Hazel Dickens. I stumbled across this song while curating music for a play set in the Appalachian mountains. Hazel Dickens is known primarily for her one of a kind vocal color, and her provocative pro-union feminist songs.
Osvaldo Golijov: Lúa Descolorida
Today, I wanted to share one of my favorite pieces of all time for soprano—“Lúa Descolorida,” by Osvaldo Golijov. The piece was premiered in 2002 by Dawn Upshaw and the Minnesota Orchestra. The recording below is from Dawn’s album “Voices of Light,” and features her long-time pianist/collaborator Gilbert Kalish.
Russ Ferrante: Revelation
We start the week with a song from my childhood. My uncle is the pianist in a longstanding jazz fusion band called the Yellowjackets. The band formed in 1977 around the popular jazz guitarist, Robben Ford. In 1991, they collaborated with the the acapella group Take 6 to record the song “Revelation.”
NYFOS@Caramoor in Review
A quick post-concert report as I bid farewell to this beautiful week. Overview: both shows went extremely well for the cast, who delivered the goods. The Sunday run took place in a black box theater that needed to be borrowed for the occasion due to renovations at Caramoor. Its dryness proved to be a challenge to be overcome. Yet the show went smoothly and faultlessly. The in-depth work we’d done on the songs gave the concert the kind of strength and subtlety I had hoped for.
Raymundo Pérez y Soto: La Cigarra
We close this week with one of my favorite Mariachi songs ever. I heard this song at a friend’s party once a long time ago and completely fell for the words and the show stopping quality of the vocals. It’s almost always sung by a woman and it requires so much control and agility from the female voice.
Sondheim: Marry me a little
Okay, so I may be on a bit of a Sondheim/Company kick. But this is one of my favorite shows! Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m inching towards 30 this year that I’m starting to get much more of what Mr. Sondheim was trying to get across. Either way, this is one of my favorite pieces of the whole evening.
Sondheim: Side by Side
I love this number from Company by Maestro Sondheim. The revival cast now features some gender switches and I’m hoping I can catch it in NY. It’s everything you want in a broadway show, plus a little bit of (okay a lot of) subtext. But it’s a good old broadway romp and I love every minute of it.
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: Dear Someone
For my second selection I’ve chosen “Dear Someone” from the album Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They are both credited for writing this song, but some internet digging actually revealed that they actually were not the original writers of the tune, which was written by Ry Cooder.
Louis Alter: I love the way you’re breaking my heart
We start this week on a very easy, light hearted note. Originally written in 1951 by Louis Alter with words by Milton Drake, I discovered “I love the way…” with this exact performance. Not only are the words and music wonderfully quirky, I think Rachael Price is one of the best voices I’ve heard.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 6
I’m rarely cheerful the day before a show. I wish I had a bit of Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s infectious, nitrous oxide enthusiasm to lift everyone’s morale—especially mine. But I always feel as if I am being led in front of a firing squad, and I seem to give birth to concerts only after a lot of labor pains. Today’s pains weren’t only metaphorical. On the car trip from Manhattan to Katonah, there was a four-car traffic accident that could easily have turned into a five-car one, were it not for Michael Barrett’s quick reflexes and presence of mind.
Love at the Crossroads
This program takes its inspiration from an opera — Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte — and a movie, Max Ophuls’ La ronde, which was based on the hugely controversial play by Arthur Schnitzler, Reigen. Both works are about the disruptive interplay of love and lust, fidelity and libido, id and superego. In our concert two couples meet and fall in love, but the honeymoon fades. Soon the guys feel trapped and the women feel betrayed, and then all hell breaks loose.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 5
My goals today were simple and clear: to get the second half of the show...
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 4
Unlike most of the directors I’ve worked with in the recent past, Stephen has not had a lot of experience with the demands—and limitations—of the concert stage. Song repertoire is not his wheelhouse, and he has not worked much with classical singers. All of this turned out to be an advantage, not a deficit. It seemed to allow him to see everything with freshness and imagination.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 3
Yesterday was a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. But today I could see why Wednesday is known as “hump day.” I tried very hard to conceal my fatigue from everyone (including myself), with the clear intention of replicating the buoyancy of Tuesday’s session.
NYFOS@Caramoor: Day 2
One of the luxuries of the Vocal Rising Stars program is that I am encouraged to invite guest teachers in to work with the cast. But it wasn’t easy to locate the right people for this crazy multilingual program. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what I needed—should it be another musician, a director, an actor, a language coach? Early in February I had a few wonderful prospects on the hook, but they got other gigs and had to bow out. And then I remembered a very moving conversation I recently had with Bénédicte Jourdois in the Juilliard lobby.