 |
July 2008 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
A Song is Born |
|
|
Thursday, 15 May 2008 |
Chamber Music Unbound presents final winter concert
 Soprano Maria Jette sings boldly in this Wagnerian opera. Chamber Music Unbound welcomes the versatile singer to the final concert of the 2008 winter season on Saturday, May 17 at Cerro Coso College.SUBMITTED PHOTOS
Ms. Jette is equally at home in classical and popular genres. She is the official "prima donna" of the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, where she performs classical songs and collaborates in chamber music. Around the country, the many operatic roles she sings range from Monteverdi's Poppea and Handel's Cleopatra through Mozart's Pamina, Susanna and Fiordiligi. With the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, she created the Mrs. in the May 2002 premiere of Garrison Keillor's operatic excursion, Mr. and Mrs. Olson. She has performed her own production of Seuss/Kapilow’s Green Eggs & Ham for more than 35,000 kids around the USA.
This season she can be heard shipboard with pianist Sonja Thompson on the Prairie Home Companion’s Norwegian cruise, singing songs by Edvard Grieg, or at the Oregon Festival of American Music with jazz legend Dick Hyman; in Mahler’s Symphony #4 with the Charlotte Symphony; or as the ghostly Miss Jessel in Britten's The Turn of the Screw at the Sacramento Opera. This is her first appearance in the Eastern Sierra.
The Music
In the first half of the concert, Ms. Jette will perform a variety of songs by Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven and the 19th century American composer, Amy Beach. The second half consists of Franz Schubert’s masterpiece, the Piano Trio in B-Flat Major.
For many years, after the turn of the century, Beach was one of the most successful composers of art songs in the United States. Singers found her compositions wonderfully effective and sympathetic to the voice, and listeners were deeply moved by her songs that seemed to flow easily from a great depth of feeling. Because of her expressive qualities, she was in retrospect nicknamed “the passionate Victorian.” Composing at a time when girls were actively discouraged to pursue musical careers and female composers were a rarity, Amy Beach succeeded against all odds to gain broad recognition during her lifetime. Her fame was mainly a result of her song compositions, and indeed, the wellsprings of Beach’s creativity lay in song.
Barely competent in the English language, Haydn and Beethoven still delighted in compositions of folk poetry for voice with the accompaniment of a piano trio. At times having to resort to the services of a translator, they set to music Scottish, Irish and Welsh texts provided by the Edinburgh publisher George Thompson who had commenced a multi-volume collection as early as 1793. As the piano had become the center of family entertainment, the incessant demand for new compositions that included voice and piano secured the collection’s significant financial success. Haydn, who had undertaken several journeys to the British isles, was a household name here as well as on the continent, and it was for his contributions, over those of Beethoven, that the collection became a best-seller.
Though financial success seems to have evaded the poor Franz Schubert throughout his short life (1797-1828), at the tender age of 13, Franz Schubert composed his first song, which immediately aroused the interest of the Imperial court music director Antonio Salieri. Little did the good man know that he was teaching the composer who was to be universally recognized as the pre-eminent master of song, whose rich vein of melody and expressive harmony reached the heart of the text in a way that music before him had not known.
Schubert’s fantastic melodic and lyrical gifts were realized similarly in his instrumental music, as can be heard in his heavenly Piano Trio opus 99, first performed in January, 1828, at Josef von Spaun’s house, at a “bachelor’s party” in celebration of his engagement. Spaun, one of Schubert’s closest friends since his youth as chorister at the Royal and Imperial College, had hosted innumerable ‘Schubertiads,’ informal gatherings dedicated to the music of Schubert, enjoyed by his vast circle of friends. The musicians on the night of January 28 are reported to have expressed their enthusiasm for the new work by fervently kissing the composer after this first performance. One of the best-loved pieces in the chamber music repertoire, the Trio opus 99 was described by composer Robert Schumann in the following words: “One glance at Schubert’s Trio and all the troubles of human existence disappear, and the world is fresh and bright again.”
Tickets are available online at www.ChamberMusicUnbound.org, at Access Art & Business Center, the Inyo Council for the Arts or at the door on concert nights after 6:45. Prices are $15/adult, $10/senior and $5/student. – CMU
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 22 May 2008 )
|
|
|
|
