Graduate voice recital

Includes recorded audio files in WAV and MP3 formats, 96:14 in lengthThe repertoire for my recital represents a range of periods from the baroque era to the twentieth century and exemplifies some of the most important genres in non-operatic solo vocal literature. The Lutheran church cantata, the German Lied, the French melodie and the English song style of the early twentieth century reveal a variety of compositional and poetic sensibilities shaped by their respective time period and geography. Through text and music, the four sets chosen for this program take both performer and audience on four different emotional journeys, each offering its own development of moods and attitudes as the songs or sections progress, each coming to its own conclusions about life and love. Composed in 1840, Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe cycle comprises the program's first set. Its sixteen songs are settings of selected poems from Heinrich Heine's sixty-six poem cycle Lyrisches Intermezzo of 1823. These songs follow the "poet" from spring love to rejection to longing to bitter madness. Rather than illustrating the text in the piano part, as is common with many lieder composers, Schumann distills through piano and voice the emotional core of the poetry with incredible simplicity and refinement. The first four songs together express the fullness of the poet's love: the first spealdng of springtime and the blossoming of love with a sense of the perpetual cycling of nature in the piano, the second expressing love with the simplicity and directness of speech-pattern rhythms, the third galloping with joy and excitement and the fourth with its sublime conversation between voice and piano. The fourth song ends with the first hint that this love is in reality a source of pain, the poet concluding that he "must weep bitterly" without any explanation, followed by a short yet elegantly sobbing postlude. The next five songs follow the poet through the pain and anger of lost love. The fifth song refers to love in the past tense, using thirty-second-note arpeggios to create a sense of urgency and suffering, while the sharpness of the descending dotted quarter-note I eighth-note accompaniment in the sixth song gives a strong sense of drama and anger. The full, repeated eighth-note chords of the seventh song lend a nobility to its almost sarcastic theme of "I don't bear a grudge," and in the eighth song, Schumann takes us from the sweet sadness of a fluttering A minor accompaniment to a moment of still sweeter A major to a strong and angry A minor conclusion. This emotional section finishes with the rolling drunkenness and harsh waltz of the ninth song, in which the poet sees his beloved celebrating but not with him. The remaining seven songs, all of varying character, take the audience to several different emotional extremes, some quiet and some powerful, corporately leading to the hopeless despair of the conclusion. (See More in Text.