Seraphim

performs

Songs for Voices and Cello

A Concert of World Premiéres

Gilda Lyons, soprano
Elaine Valby, mezzo-soprano
Robert La Rue, cello

Sappho Songs — Daron Hagen

10 of 10,000 — Paula M. Kimper

Incantations — Gilda Lyons

BIOGRAPHIES

Daron Hagen is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read his biography, please click [here].

Paula Kimper (www.patienceandsarah.com) is a composer of opera, theater, and dance music.  Ms. Kimper's first opera, Patience & Sarah, received its world premiere in Lincoln Center Festival '98, with further productions in Denver, and Chicago. The Captivation of Eunice Williams, commissioned by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association of Deerfield, MA, premiered in July 2004 as a part of the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the 1704 attack on Deerfield.  Ms. Kimper is at work on an opera based on The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.  Amy Pivar, Richard Daniels, Walt Whitman Project, Washington Shakespeare Company, and the White Barn Theater have commissioned other recent works.

Robert La Rue is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read his biography, please click [here].

Gilda Lyons is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read her biography, please click [here].

Ekaine Valby is a member of the Phoenix Players. To read her biography, please click [here].

PROGRAM NOTES

Sappho Songs (2004)
I have wanted for years to set some Sappho for Elaine, Rob, and Gilda to perform together. I finally got the chance last fall during a residency in Italy. First I asked Rob to choose a handful of Sappho poems and to arrange them into an emotionally and psychologically satisfying sequence. Then I adapted the poetry (in the process superimposing six of them in order to form dialogues and inserting a reprise of one of them) as I would the words of a living librettist. The cycle is thirty-two minutes long and is dedicated to the performers.  — Daron Hagen

10 of 10,000 (2005)
As R. H. Blyth would say, poetry is the everyday life of a poet.  A poet is one who lives in the mind of poetry, who can see in the most insignificant occurrence the path to enlightenment, and who then takes on the daily labor of writing these observations down in words, from out of the invisible mind into the material world.  Elaine is such a poet and I am honored to receive such gifts.  These haiku are brief and private; they have nothing to do with the marketplace, or with an identity in public life.  This set of ten is an indicative glimpse into that inner world.  Thanks to Daron, Gilda, Rob, and Elaine for dreaming this concert into existence.  — Paula M. Kimper

Incantations (2005)
The earliest poems must have been incantations — summoning charms, prayers of healing, offerings for good harvests, songs to coax spirits into life after death — a strange combination of the deeply spiritual and the entirely functional. As I assembled text for Incantations, I thought there might be no force more perfect for summoning than an ensemble of two voices and cello. Very near the completion of this cycle, my mother — a dynamic, powerful woman whose life force seems unstoppable — fell ill and was rushed in for emergency surgery. Steeped in the prayers and charms collected here, I found great strength in the ancient words of those who had gone before; the human condition seemed to have changed very little since the ancient Egyptians inscribed prayer on the walls of their great pyramids, or the Incan’s sang to their Sun. The cycle as a whole is dedicated with respect, admiration and love to the performers for whom it was written, Elaine Valby and Robert La Rue. Still, the last song, a “Nahua Hymn at a Fast”, is dedicated to my mother, Gilda Alemán Lyons (who has since healed to full strength!) – a song written in praise of her tremendous life force and boundless generosity of spirit.  — Gilda Lyons