CAIC ANNOUNCES 2015 COLLABORATIVE WORKS FESTIVAL: AMERICAN SPIRIT - 7/8/2015
CHICAGO--Following the tremendous success of the 2013 and 2014 Collaborative Works Festivals, Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago will open its 2014-2015 season with its fourth annual Collaborative Works Festival, held at venues around Chicago from September 9 – 12, 2015. The 2015 Festival, American Spirit, will feature two salon concerts exploring American composers’ and poets’ meditations on spirituality. This year’s Festival features yet another all-star lineup of internationally acclaimed artists, including Grammy Award-nominated soprano Nicole Heaston; acclaimed soprano Laquita Mitchell; CAIC co-founders Nicholas Phan and Shannon McGinnis; and 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant winner, pianist Michael Brown. For its traditional annual solo vocal recital, the Festival will also include the Chicago recital debut of superstar Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni, who will appear with pianist Craig Terry.
Continuing a commitment to ensuring that the Chicago classical music lineup contains at least one major vocal recital each season, the 2015 Collaborative Works Festival will open with its annual solo recital on September 9, 2015 in Ganz Hall, presented in collaboration with Roosevelt University’s Chicago College for the Performing Arts. This year’s solo recital headliner, Luca Pisaroni, will perform a program that is reflective of his life as an Italian bass-baritone now based in Vienna, Austria, comprised of songs by the great Viennese composer Franz Schubert and Italian composers Bellini, Donaudy, and Tosti. Widely known as an opera superstar who frequents stages such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Vienna State Opera, and Salzburg Festival, Pisaroni is also a regular recitalist in the world’s premiere recital halls, including London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Carnegie Hall. The New York Times wrote of his 2014 recital in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall that:
“There was much to admire in the evening-long program of songs by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert, especially Mr. Pisaroni’s rich, muscular timbre and smooth-flowing legato… Mr. Pisaroni’s German diction was clean, and his choice of texts — predominantly by Heine and Goethe — hinted at a discerning reader and thinker.”
Pianist Craig Terry, who is also the music director of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, will be Pisaroni’s recital partner.
Terry, who appears regularly in recital with such esteemed singers as Christine Brewer, Stephanie Blythe, Joyce Didonato, and Susan Graham in venues such as the Kennedy Center, Ravinia Festival, and Carnegie Hall, will lead the Festival’s annual Master Class at PianoForte on the afternoon of September 11, 2015. This year’s master class will focus on American art song, and will feature rising young stars of Chicago’s classical vocal music scene, accompanied by CAIC artistic staff.
This year’s first salon concert, presented in partnership with The Poetry Foundation on September 10, 2015, will explore the impact of the Transcendentalist movement on American composers. The religious and philosophical movement, sparked by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s esaay, Nature, has been a profound influence on many American composers and poets. This first concert will feature performances of songs by Charles Ives, who was fascinated by the transcendentalists and based much of his music on them and their values, as well as settings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by iconic American composers Aaron Copland and Lee Hoiby.
The closing concert of this Festival will be a second salon concert, held on September 12, 2015 at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse. The concert will continue the exploration of American composers’ meditations on spirituality, focusing in on the influence of spirituals, hymns and liturgical music on Leonard Bernstein, John Carter, and Aaron Copland, as well as performances of Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, settings of various anonymous poems written by Medieval Irish monks, and John Harbison’s song cycle Mirabai Songs, settings of Mirabai’s ecstatic love poetry to the Hindu god, Vishnu.
Complete information about the 2015 Collaborative Works Festival, including complete artist biographies and ticket information, is available at CAIC’s website: www.caichicago.org.
CHICAGO--Following the tremendous success of the 2013 and 2014 Collaborative Works Festivals, Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago will open its 2014-2015 season with its fourth annual Collaborative Works Festival, held at venues around Chicago from September 9 – 12, 2015. The 2015 Festival, American Spirit, will feature two salon concerts exploring American composers’ and poets’ meditations on spirituality. This year’s Festival features yet another all-star lineup of internationally acclaimed artists, including Grammy Award-nominated soprano Nicole Heaston; acclaimed soprano Laquita Mitchell; CAIC co-founders Nicholas Phan and Shannon McGinnis; and 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant winner, pianist Michael Brown. For its traditional annual solo vocal recital, the Festival will also include the Chicago recital debut of superstar Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni, who will appear with pianist Craig Terry.
Continuing a commitment to ensuring that the Chicago classical music lineup contains at least one major vocal recital each season, the 2015 Collaborative Works Festival will open with its annual solo recital on September 9, 2015 in Ganz Hall, presented in collaboration with Roosevelt University’s Chicago College for the Performing Arts. This year’s solo recital headliner, Luca Pisaroni, will perform a program that is reflective of his life as an Italian bass-baritone now based in Vienna, Austria, comprised of songs by the great Viennese composer Franz Schubert and Italian composers Bellini, Donaudy, and Tosti. Widely known as an opera superstar who frequents stages such as the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Vienna State Opera, and Salzburg Festival, Pisaroni is also a regular recitalist in the world’s premiere recital halls, including London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Carnegie Hall. The New York Times wrote of his 2014 recital in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall that:
“There was much to admire in the evening-long program of songs by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert, especially Mr. Pisaroni’s rich, muscular timbre and smooth-flowing legato… Mr. Pisaroni’s German diction was clean, and his choice of texts — predominantly by Heine and Goethe — hinted at a discerning reader and thinker.”
Pianist Craig Terry, who is also the music director of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, will be Pisaroni’s recital partner.
Terry, who appears regularly in recital with such esteemed singers as Christine Brewer, Stephanie Blythe, Joyce Didonato, and Susan Graham in venues such as the Kennedy Center, Ravinia Festival, and Carnegie Hall, will lead the Festival’s annual Master Class at PianoForte on the afternoon of September 11, 2015. This year’s master class will focus on American art song, and will feature rising young stars of Chicago’s classical vocal music scene, accompanied by CAIC artistic staff.
This year’s first salon concert, presented in partnership with The Poetry Foundation on September 10, 2015, will explore the impact of the Transcendentalist movement on American composers. The religious and philosophical movement, sparked by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s esaay, Nature, has been a profound influence on many American composers and poets. This first concert will feature performances of songs by Charles Ives, who was fascinated by the transcendentalists and based much of his music on them and their values, as well as settings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry by iconic American composers Aaron Copland and Lee Hoiby.
The closing concert of this Festival will be a second salon concert, held on September 12, 2015 at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse. The concert will continue the exploration of American composers’ meditations on spirituality, focusing in on the influence of spirituals, hymns and liturgical music on Leonard Bernstein, John Carter, and Aaron Copland, as well as performances of Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, settings of various anonymous poems written by Medieval Irish monks, and John Harbison’s song cycle Mirabai Songs, settings of Mirabai’s ecstatic love poetry to the Hindu god, Vishnu.
Complete information about the 2015 Collaborative Works Festival, including complete artist biographies and ticket information, is available at CAIC’s website: www.caichicago.org.
CHICAGO GROUP REVITALIZES ARTS SONG TRADITION WITH COMPELLING RECITALS (CHICAGO TRIBUNE) - 9/13/2013
With the Collaborative Works festivals tenor Nicholas Phan and colleagues of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago are presenting annually, Chicago is doing its bit to rescue art song performance from the endangered species list.
Phan, who is CAIC's artistic director, took part in the opening concert of the second suchfestival on Wednesday as well as in a song recital given by countertenor David Daniels under CAIC auspices Thursday night in Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library. Daniels, who was accompanied by the veteran pianist Martin Katz, inaugurated a new festival tradition, an annual solo vocal recital.
Thursday's event marked the first recital the celebrated countertenor has given in the Chicago area in a decade. It found him in generally good vocal state, although the opening group of Brahms songs indicated some of the bloom is now gone from the top of a still remarkable vocal instrument, even if Daniels' artistry and musical intelligence remain as finely honed as ever.
Once the voice was warmed, the singer settled into an assortment of Italian Baroque songs by Jacopo Peri, Francesco Durante and others. He was oddly parsimonious with ornamentation in Giulio Caccini's "Amarilli, mia bella"; otherwise, the sensitivity to nuance and close attention to style one knows from his Baroque opera performances came through admirably.
A set of Reynaldo Hahn songs (including the familiar "A Chloris") brought sweet sentiment and breezy urbanity in turns, while Steven Mark Kohn's flavorsome arrangements of five American folksongs extended the tradition of Aaron Copland's folksong settings into a more contemporary realm. Daniels delivered them with ample sincerity, getting some lusty vocalhelp from Katz in the final song, the blackly funny "The Farmer's Curst Wife."
Daniels' contribution to the Benjamin Britten centennial was "Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac" (1952), an austere setting of the biblical story of God's testing the Jewish patriarch's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son. Daniels took the female alto part (written for and first performed by Kathleen Ferrier, with Peter Pears creating the tenor role) while Phan assumed the tenor part. Individually they were very fine, and their merging of voices, as the voice of the Creator, could not have been more acutely or beautifully achieved.
Katz's insightful accompaniments added immeasurably to the success of the evening.
The salon recital that launched the festival Wednesday at the Poetry Foundation on West Superior was devoted entirely to Britten songs, specifically song cycles written in collaboration with poets W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell. In addition to Phan, the skilled performers included soprano Kiera Duffy and pianist and CAIC executive director Shannon McGinnis. University of Chicago professor and poet John Wilkinson provided the informative and insightful commentary.
The cycle "On This Island" (1937) showed to what extent Auden's mentoring nurtured Britten's uncanny ability to absorb the sound and sense of English verse into elegant vocal lines and atmospheric piano accompaniments. The five songs range widely in tone, from fiercely urgent to darkly humorous. Duffy sang them with cool, shining musicality even if her singing fell just shy of the pitch at times.
She brought airy charm to four Britten-Auden "Cabaret Songs" from the 1930s, which take various aspects of love as their purview. Think of a more strait laced Cole Porter and you get an idea of what these delectable vignettes are like.
Much more serious in intent is "The Heart of the Matter," a curious if compelling sequence of Sitwell songs and poetry Britten assembled for the 1956 Aldeburgh Festival. At its heart is "Canticle III, Still Falls the Rain," a wrenching lament over the crucifixion of Christ. Phan sang the truncated version of the cycle Pears prepared for a Britten memorial concert in London in 1983. With an interpretive manner not unlike that of Pears, but with much clearer diction, Phan had one hanging on every word. His power and authority were undeniable, and he had solid support from McGinnis on piano, Gail Williams on horn and Cindy Gold as narrator.
FOR NICHOLAS PHAN SING SINGING IS AS MUCH A CRUSADE AS AN ART FORM (CHICAGO TRIBUNE) - 9/5/2013
Chicago has not exactly built a reputation for being a world-class hub of art song performance and study. But this fall could bring about a sea change, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Nicholas Phan and friends.
In fact, the gifted American tenor will be all over the local classical music map this month and next, when he will headline several celebrations of Benjamin Britten's vocal music, keyed to the great British composer's centenary.
The festivities will begin later this week when the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, of which Phan is artistic director, presents its second annual Collaborative Works Festival. Bracketing the five-day event will be two recitals of songs by Britten and others performed by Phan, Kiera Duffy, Jennifer Johnson Cano, pianist Martin Katz and other artists.
The festival also will inaugurate a new tradition — an annual solo vocal recital — when it hosts the acclaimed American countertenor David Daniels in his first Chicago recital in nearly 15 years.
"CAIC's goal is to create a serious home for vocal chamber music in America in Chicago, and we hope to expand every year moving forward," Phan says. "Singers find fewer and fewer venues around the country with a commitment to this repertory. We want to ensure that Chicago audiences have the opportunity to hear artists of David's stature in recital on a regular basis."
That objective plugs directly into the larger mission of CAIC, a nonprofit vocal coaching and accompanying studio created here last year by Phan and executive director Shannon McGinnis. Their goal is to raise the general awareness of the rich art song and vocal chamber repertory, while cultivating a larger public for an intimate art form that has long been a tough sell in the city.
An alumnus of the vocal program at Ravinia's Steans Music Institute, Phan, 34, is well-qualified to lead the charge. Not only has he championed the art song literature all over the world, in recent years he has released two superlative recordings of Britten song cycles on the Avie label.
Indeed, he's engaged in a multi-year project to explore Britten's considerable output for the tenor voice, virtually all of it composed for tenor Peter Pears, Britten's life partner, companion and muse.
"What drew me to Britten's music, and what makes that music special to me to this day, is its perfect combination of head and heart," Phan says. "Unlike his British contemporaries, he really was an international composer. You get this masterfully crafted music that deals with extraordinarily poignant subjects everyone can relate to. Britten's music doesn't apologize for its technical difficulty, yet at the same time it pierces the listener's heart."
Phan discovered Britten during the late 1990s when he was a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While delving through the stacks in the music library, he came across volumes of the composer's correspondence, which included numerous letters to Pears. The two men lived together during a perilous era when homosexual acts were illegal in Great Britain, and their domestic partnership came in for close official scrutiny.
"For a young gay man like myself living at that time, there weren't role models around like Britten and Pears," the singer says. "They were gay pioneers, although they probably would cringe if they heard themselves described that way. To realize these two men spent their lives together and enjoyed a very fulfilling, long-term partnership that was both creative and romantic, was really inspiring to me. That's when I started looking at Britten's music really seriously and began adding it to my repertory."
Despite the fact that Britten's music for high male voice was crafted to suit the distinctive timbre, range and qualities of Pears' voice (also, of course, his unique artistry), Phan says the songs fit him beautifully.
"This music has really taught me a lot about my voice and about singing in general," the singer explains. "Britten's notes have always led my throat to wherever it's supposed to go. It feels very natural for me to sing."
Following his two song programs for this year's Collaborative Works Festival, Phan will return Oct. 18 to present a recital of Britten and Schubert songs on the University of Chicago Presents series in Mandel Hall.
"As a Midwesterner, I always feel Chicago is my home away from home," he says. "It's nice to be able to spend so much time in this great city."
The 2013 Collaborative Works Festival will open with a free recital of Britten songs on texts by W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell, to be presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and University of Chicago Presents. The performers include singers Nicholas Phan and Kiera Duffy; 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior St.
The festival continues with a song recital by countertenor David Daniels, with pianist Martin Katz; 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St. ($40, $20 students).
It will conclude with a program of folk song arrangements by Britten and others, performed by Jennifer Johnson Cano, Phan and Duffy, with harpist Nuiko Wadden and members of eighth blackbird; 2 p.m. Sept. 15 at Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.; $40, $20 for students at caichicago.org/collaborative-works-festival.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE REVIEW OF THE INAUGURAL COLLABORATIVE ARTS FESTIVAL - 4/1/2012
Training young performers in the fine art of song singing has unfortunately taken a back seat to developing operatic talent in most vocal education programs across the country.
The Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, a recently-created, not-for-profit vocal coaching and accompanying studio, is working diligently to correct the imbalance. It is also striving to provide young art-song singers with performance opportunities in private homes throughout the area. A hoped-for result will be to raise the general awareness of the rich repertory of art song and vocal chamber music, and to develop larger audiences for that repertory.
The organization took a giant leap toward that goal last week at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library, where it launched its first Collaborative Works Festival, an annual celebration of art song showcasing up-and-coming singers. Jesse Blumberg, a greatly gifted young baritone from New York, presented Franz Schubert's song cycles "Die schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise," with the veteran pianist Martin Katz as his accompanist. I caught "Winterreise" on Saturday night and was glad I did.
Blumberg was a smart choice to kick off the festival, since he champions the art of song both as a performer and a presenter: In 2007 he founded the Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York, a forum for song and chamber music. His deep understanding of what makes "Winterreise" the supreme challenge of a lieder singer's art came through in his caring and musicianly performance.
Schubert's setting of Wilhelm Muller's poems is an intimate diary of the soul — a winter journey of a rejected lover, wandering from his beloved's town across an alien landscape of icy roads and frozen hills. There are brief moments of happy remembrance, but the prevailing emotions expressed through the music are anger, grief, defiance, desolation and resignation.
Mindful of projecting the 24 songs as a musical and poetic continuity, Blumberg did not paint them in the broadly dramatic strokes favored by other interpreters; nor did he push his attractive, smooth-grained lyric baritone to drive home expressive points. His interpretation clearly was the result of serious, detailed study. His wanderer seemed to realize the hopelessness of his situation from the outset of his journey. Mood swings were subtly drawn, and even lighter songs such as "Der Lindenbaum" brought few slivers of comfort.
But if the singer underplayed certain moments, such as the final verse of "Der Wegweiser," in which the wanderer contemplates the sweet comfort of death, his singing took on telling intensity at other times. He poured out the words and music of "Ruckblick" in a torrent of longing. His voice almost broke at the poignant final line of "Fruhlingstraum," where the protagonist wonders if he will ever hold his sweetheart in his arms again.
Even so, Blumberg reserved his finest work for the final songs, in which the wanderer, now bereft of everything, becomes ever more morbid in his thoughts. In the final lied, "Der Leiermann," he narrowed his voice to a dry, distracted husk as a hurdy-gurdy tolled the traveler into madness. The effect was absolutely shattering.
Ever the supportive and probing collaborator, Katz was alive to every nuance in the vocal and piano parts. The legendary accompanist was a marvel when it came to translating Schubert's raucous ravens, galloping horses and rustling branches into musical sound. (Full Article)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE PREVIEWS THE INAUGURAL COLLABORATIVE ARTS FESTIVAL - 3/27/2012
Chicago is about to experience a long-needed festival devoted to art song singing.
The planned annual Collaborative Works Festival is integral to the mission of its sponsoring organization, the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, to train young area singers in the art song repertory and provide performance outlets they would not otherwise receive, all the while building local audiences for a uniquely intimate form of music-making that long has been a hard sell in the city.
Kicking off the festival this week at the Harold Washington Library will be Schubert's "Die schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise." The two song cycles will be sung, on Thursday and Saturday nights, respectively, by the New York-based baritone Jesse Blumberg, with the veteran pianist Martin Katz as accompanist.
On Friday, Blumberg will coach voice students at the CAIC studios, and Katz will teach a master class in German lieder at the PianoForte Salon in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S.Michigan Ave.; the master class is free and open to the public.
Tenor Nicholas Phan, CAIC's artistic director and a celebrated interpreter of art songs, says he chose Chicago as the festival site because "there are fewer and fewer places presenting song recitals in the area." (Full Article)
With the Collaborative Works festivals tenor Nicholas Phan and colleagues of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago are presenting annually, Chicago is doing its bit to rescue art song performance from the endangered species list.
Phan, who is CAIC's artistic director, took part in the opening concert of the second suchfestival on Wednesday as well as in a song recital given by countertenor David Daniels under CAIC auspices Thursday night in Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library. Daniels, who was accompanied by the veteran pianist Martin Katz, inaugurated a new festival tradition, an annual solo vocal recital.
Thursday's event marked the first recital the celebrated countertenor has given in the Chicago area in a decade. It found him in generally good vocal state, although the opening group of Brahms songs indicated some of the bloom is now gone from the top of a still remarkable vocal instrument, even if Daniels' artistry and musical intelligence remain as finely honed as ever.
Once the voice was warmed, the singer settled into an assortment of Italian Baroque songs by Jacopo Peri, Francesco Durante and others. He was oddly parsimonious with ornamentation in Giulio Caccini's "Amarilli, mia bella"; otherwise, the sensitivity to nuance and close attention to style one knows from his Baroque opera performances came through admirably.
A set of Reynaldo Hahn songs (including the familiar "A Chloris") brought sweet sentiment and breezy urbanity in turns, while Steven Mark Kohn's flavorsome arrangements of five American folksongs extended the tradition of Aaron Copland's folksong settings into a more contemporary realm. Daniels delivered them with ample sincerity, getting some lusty vocalhelp from Katz in the final song, the blackly funny "The Farmer's Curst Wife."
Daniels' contribution to the Benjamin Britten centennial was "Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac" (1952), an austere setting of the biblical story of God's testing the Jewish patriarch's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son. Daniels took the female alto part (written for and first performed by Kathleen Ferrier, with Peter Pears creating the tenor role) while Phan assumed the tenor part. Individually they were very fine, and their merging of voices, as the voice of the Creator, could not have been more acutely or beautifully achieved.
Katz's insightful accompaniments added immeasurably to the success of the evening.
The salon recital that launched the festival Wednesday at the Poetry Foundation on West Superior was devoted entirely to Britten songs, specifically song cycles written in collaboration with poets W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell. In addition to Phan, the skilled performers included soprano Kiera Duffy and pianist and CAIC executive director Shannon McGinnis. University of Chicago professor and poet John Wilkinson provided the informative and insightful commentary.
The cycle "On This Island" (1937) showed to what extent Auden's mentoring nurtured Britten's uncanny ability to absorb the sound and sense of English verse into elegant vocal lines and atmospheric piano accompaniments. The five songs range widely in tone, from fiercely urgent to darkly humorous. Duffy sang them with cool, shining musicality even if her singing fell just shy of the pitch at times.
She brought airy charm to four Britten-Auden "Cabaret Songs" from the 1930s, which take various aspects of love as their purview. Think of a more strait laced Cole Porter and you get an idea of what these delectable vignettes are like.
Much more serious in intent is "The Heart of the Matter," a curious if compelling sequence of Sitwell songs and poetry Britten assembled for the 1956 Aldeburgh Festival. At its heart is "Canticle III, Still Falls the Rain," a wrenching lament over the crucifixion of Christ. Phan sang the truncated version of the cycle Pears prepared for a Britten memorial concert in London in 1983. With an interpretive manner not unlike that of Pears, but with much clearer diction, Phan had one hanging on every word. His power and authority were undeniable, and he had solid support from McGinnis on piano, Gail Williams on horn and Cindy Gold as narrator.
FOR NICHOLAS PHAN SING SINGING IS AS MUCH A CRUSADE AS AN ART FORM (CHICAGO TRIBUNE) - 9/5/2013
Chicago has not exactly built a reputation for being a world-class hub of art song performance and study. But this fall could bring about a sea change, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Nicholas Phan and friends.
In fact, the gifted American tenor will be all over the local classical music map this month and next, when he will headline several celebrations of Benjamin Britten's vocal music, keyed to the great British composer's centenary.
The festivities will begin later this week when the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, of which Phan is artistic director, presents its second annual Collaborative Works Festival. Bracketing the five-day event will be two recitals of songs by Britten and others performed by Phan, Kiera Duffy, Jennifer Johnson Cano, pianist Martin Katz and other artists.
The festival also will inaugurate a new tradition — an annual solo vocal recital — when it hosts the acclaimed American countertenor David Daniels in his first Chicago recital in nearly 15 years.
"CAIC's goal is to create a serious home for vocal chamber music in America in Chicago, and we hope to expand every year moving forward," Phan says. "Singers find fewer and fewer venues around the country with a commitment to this repertory. We want to ensure that Chicago audiences have the opportunity to hear artists of David's stature in recital on a regular basis."
That objective plugs directly into the larger mission of CAIC, a nonprofit vocal coaching and accompanying studio created here last year by Phan and executive director Shannon McGinnis. Their goal is to raise the general awareness of the rich art song and vocal chamber repertory, while cultivating a larger public for an intimate art form that has long been a tough sell in the city.
An alumnus of the vocal program at Ravinia's Steans Music Institute, Phan, 34, is well-qualified to lead the charge. Not only has he championed the art song literature all over the world, in recent years he has released two superlative recordings of Britten song cycles on the Avie label.
Indeed, he's engaged in a multi-year project to explore Britten's considerable output for the tenor voice, virtually all of it composed for tenor Peter Pears, Britten's life partner, companion and muse.
"What drew me to Britten's music, and what makes that music special to me to this day, is its perfect combination of head and heart," Phan says. "Unlike his British contemporaries, he really was an international composer. You get this masterfully crafted music that deals with extraordinarily poignant subjects everyone can relate to. Britten's music doesn't apologize for its technical difficulty, yet at the same time it pierces the listener's heart."
Phan discovered Britten during the late 1990s when he was a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While delving through the stacks in the music library, he came across volumes of the composer's correspondence, which included numerous letters to Pears. The two men lived together during a perilous era when homosexual acts were illegal in Great Britain, and their domestic partnership came in for close official scrutiny.
"For a young gay man like myself living at that time, there weren't role models around like Britten and Pears," the singer says. "They were gay pioneers, although they probably would cringe if they heard themselves described that way. To realize these two men spent their lives together and enjoyed a very fulfilling, long-term partnership that was both creative and romantic, was really inspiring to me. That's when I started looking at Britten's music really seriously and began adding it to my repertory."
Despite the fact that Britten's music for high male voice was crafted to suit the distinctive timbre, range and qualities of Pears' voice (also, of course, his unique artistry), Phan says the songs fit him beautifully.
"This music has really taught me a lot about my voice and about singing in general," the singer explains. "Britten's notes have always led my throat to wherever it's supposed to go. It feels very natural for me to sing."
Following his two song programs for this year's Collaborative Works Festival, Phan will return Oct. 18 to present a recital of Britten and Schubert songs on the University of Chicago Presents series in Mandel Hall.
"As a Midwesterner, I always feel Chicago is my home away from home," he says. "It's nice to be able to spend so much time in this great city."
The 2013 Collaborative Works Festival will open with a free recital of Britten songs on texts by W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell, to be presented in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and University of Chicago Presents. The performers include singers Nicholas Phan and Kiera Duffy; 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior St.
The festival continues with a song recital by countertenor David Daniels, with pianist Martin Katz; 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Pritzker Auditorium, Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St. ($40, $20 students).
It will conclude with a program of folk song arrangements by Britten and others, performed by Jennifer Johnson Cano, Phan and Duffy, with harpist Nuiko Wadden and members of eighth blackbird; 2 p.m. Sept. 15 at Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.; $40, $20 for students at caichicago.org/collaborative-works-festival.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE REVIEW OF THE INAUGURAL COLLABORATIVE ARTS FESTIVAL - 4/1/2012
Training young performers in the fine art of song singing has unfortunately taken a back seat to developing operatic talent in most vocal education programs across the country.
The Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, a recently-created, not-for-profit vocal coaching and accompanying studio, is working diligently to correct the imbalance. It is also striving to provide young art-song singers with performance opportunities in private homes throughout the area. A hoped-for result will be to raise the general awareness of the rich repertory of art song and vocal chamber music, and to develop larger audiences for that repertory.
The organization took a giant leap toward that goal last week at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium of the Harold Washington Library, where it launched its first Collaborative Works Festival, an annual celebration of art song showcasing up-and-coming singers. Jesse Blumberg, a greatly gifted young baritone from New York, presented Franz Schubert's song cycles "Die schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise," with the veteran pianist Martin Katz as his accompanist. I caught "Winterreise" on Saturday night and was glad I did.
Blumberg was a smart choice to kick off the festival, since he champions the art of song both as a performer and a presenter: In 2007 he founded the Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York, a forum for song and chamber music. His deep understanding of what makes "Winterreise" the supreme challenge of a lieder singer's art came through in his caring and musicianly performance.
Schubert's setting of Wilhelm Muller's poems is an intimate diary of the soul — a winter journey of a rejected lover, wandering from his beloved's town across an alien landscape of icy roads and frozen hills. There are brief moments of happy remembrance, but the prevailing emotions expressed through the music are anger, grief, defiance, desolation and resignation.
Mindful of projecting the 24 songs as a musical and poetic continuity, Blumberg did not paint them in the broadly dramatic strokes favored by other interpreters; nor did he push his attractive, smooth-grained lyric baritone to drive home expressive points. His interpretation clearly was the result of serious, detailed study. His wanderer seemed to realize the hopelessness of his situation from the outset of his journey. Mood swings were subtly drawn, and even lighter songs such as "Der Lindenbaum" brought few slivers of comfort.
But if the singer underplayed certain moments, such as the final verse of "Der Wegweiser," in which the wanderer contemplates the sweet comfort of death, his singing took on telling intensity at other times. He poured out the words and music of "Ruckblick" in a torrent of longing. His voice almost broke at the poignant final line of "Fruhlingstraum," where the protagonist wonders if he will ever hold his sweetheart in his arms again.
Even so, Blumberg reserved his finest work for the final songs, in which the wanderer, now bereft of everything, becomes ever more morbid in his thoughts. In the final lied, "Der Leiermann," he narrowed his voice to a dry, distracted husk as a hurdy-gurdy tolled the traveler into madness. The effect was absolutely shattering.
Ever the supportive and probing collaborator, Katz was alive to every nuance in the vocal and piano parts. The legendary accompanist was a marvel when it came to translating Schubert's raucous ravens, galloping horses and rustling branches into musical sound. (Full Article)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE PREVIEWS THE INAUGURAL COLLABORATIVE ARTS FESTIVAL - 3/27/2012
Chicago is about to experience a long-needed festival devoted to art song singing.
The planned annual Collaborative Works Festival is integral to the mission of its sponsoring organization, the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, to train young area singers in the art song repertory and provide performance outlets they would not otherwise receive, all the while building local audiences for a uniquely intimate form of music-making that long has been a hard sell in the city.
Kicking off the festival this week at the Harold Washington Library will be Schubert's "Die schone Mullerin" and "Winterreise." The two song cycles will be sung, on Thursday and Saturday nights, respectively, by the New York-based baritone Jesse Blumberg, with the veteran pianist Martin Katz as accompanist.
On Friday, Blumberg will coach voice students at the CAIC studios, and Katz will teach a master class in German lieder at the PianoForte Salon in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S.Michigan Ave.; the master class is free and open to the public.
Tenor Nicholas Phan, CAIC's artistic director and a celebrated interpreter of art songs, says he chose Chicago as the festival site because "there are fewer and fewer places presenting song recitals in the area." (Full Article)
all performance and master class photography by Elliot Mandel
