The Phoenix Concerts

PERFORMERS’ NOTE

Mark and I began conversations about this recital in late spring 2005. We originally intended to do a program that would be half baroque and half contemporary. Nearly a year later the project had stalled and we realized we wanted more than anything to do a program of all-contemporary music. It immediately became apparent that we needed to enlist the help of some of our composer friends and colleagues to help us create such a program, since there is a dearth of duets for two countertenors. Every composer we approached about this project was enthusiastic about writing music for us. And in each case, we were given music of exceptional beauty, power and inspiration. Two composers (Elliot Levine and Joseph & David Zellnik) refashioned previously-composed work, but the rest of the works on the program this evening are world premieres. Both Mark and I have had extensive experience performing different types of contemporary work, so we were well aware of the challenges of this repertoire. Never before have I found an undertaking to be so arduous and yet so completely rewarding. This program is still very much a work-in-progress, but what we present this evening is an eclectic and brilliant assortment of songs by some of the most gifted composers working today. — Daniel Gundlach

PERFORMERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Mark Crayton is hailed by critics for the pure beauty of his voice, his expressive and insightful interpretations, and his natural musicality. In 2004, Mr. Crayton was the winner of Classical Singer magazine’s vocal competition. Mr. Crayton performs on concert stages and in opera houses throughout the United States and Europe, and his extensive repertoire includes many and diverse works. Mr. Crayton created the role of the First Minstrel in the Holland Festival’s production of Peter Onnes’ opera/theatre piece Pantagruel et Gargantua. In 2002-03, Mark Crayton was invited by composer Philip Glass and Tony Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman to sing in the world premiere performances of Glass’ opera Galileo Galilei in Chicago, New York City, and London. In addition, Mark Crayton was chosen by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb to sing in their new musical The Visit starring Chita Rivera at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago; discussions are now underway for a possible New York production as well as a production in Washington, DC. Recent seasons have included performances at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, Carnegie Hall, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Opera Theatre of St. Louis (American premiere of Goehr’s Arianna), San Diego Opera (Handel’s Giulio Cesare), Lyric Opera of Chicago (Handel’s Partenope — Armindo cover), and the Kennedy Center. This season, Mr. Crayton returns to the Jewel Box series as well as recitals with Ars Musica Chicago and at Roosevelt University plus more performances of Conversations with colleague Daniel Gundlach. This winter Mr. Crayton makes his Seattle Opera debut in the role of Tolomeo in Handel’s Giulio Cesare.

Daniel Gundlach has been praised as a vivid singer and actor in his appearances throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. He has sung with James Conlon, Helmuth Rilling, Marc Minkowski, John Nelson, Daniel Beckwith, and Jeffrey Thomas, among others. His operatic appearances include Tolomeo in Giulio Cesare, Arsamene in Xerxes, Arsace and Armindo in Partenope, Polinesso in Ariodante, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ottone in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, the Sorceress in Dido and Æneas and Zephyrus in Apollo et Hyacinthus with Chicago Lyric Opera, New York City Opera, Minnesota Opera, Skylight Opera, Edmonton Opera, the Broomhill Festival (UK), Les Musiciens du Louvre, and the Dallas Bach Society. He has also performed extensively in oratorio and concert work with the Bach Collegium Stuttgart, the American Bach Soloists, and many other organizations. He recently created roles in Gualtiero Dazzi’s Le Luthier de Venise at the Théatre du Châtelet in Paris and in Pascal Dusapin’s Perelà, l’homme de fumée at the Opéra de Paris and at the Opéra de Montpellier. A live recording of these latter performances has been recently released on the Naïve Classics label. He is currently developing a program of American popular song entitled Don’t Fence Me In. In addition to his performing career, Daniel Gundlach is active as a writer, teacher and vocal coach. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to Art Song and the legacy of Lotte Lehmann, the great German soprano.

James Janssen made his debut at age 13 with Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D with the Anderson Symphony Orchestra. A native of Indianapolis, he received his education at Indiana University and Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute, studying with Penelope Crawford, Patrick Allen, Webb Wiggins, and Lisa Goode Crawford. Janssen is the artistic director and a founding member of Haydn by the Lake, Chicagoland’s period instrument chamber ensemble specializing in the music of the 18th and 19th centuries. He tours regularly in recital with Mark Crayton. In 2001, he was featured in recital with Crayton on Chicago’s WFMT in a Live from WFMT broadcast. Janssen has appeared in the Chicago area with Ars Antigua, the St. Clement Orchestra, in recital with fellow fortepianist David Schrader, and on Northeastern Illinois University’s acclaimed Jewel Box series with Haydn by the Lake and also with Crayton. Outside the Chicago area, he has performed in Indianapolis, Washington DC at the Phillips Collection, and New York City, where he made his debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. Internationally, he has performed on the Aemstelrande Concerten series in Amsterdam and at Grosvenor Hall in London. Engagements of the last season included Chicago performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat, K.449 with Ars Antigua, Handel’s Messiah with the St. Clement Orchestra, a recital of Mozart four-hand sonatas on fortepiano with Thomas Gerber of Ensemble Voltaire, and recitals in London and Amsterdam. Janssen is the organist at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois.

COMPOSERS’ NOTES & BIOGRAPHIES

Craig Urquhart: The Quilt Song
This song is derived from 2 of 27 text blocks found on a friend’s patchwork signature quilt, crafted in 1841 as a memorial for his ancestors who left the eastern seaboard bound for the heartland. The heirloom commemorates an entire community’s friendship with a family, whose members would never be seen, and very rarely heard from, again. Genealogists use signed quilts such as this as an aide to tracing family lines. The authors of both texts are descendants of Mary Estey who, at the age of 68, in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, was tried and hung as a witch.

Craig Urquhart’s new CD, Secret and Divine Signs: The Music of Craig Urquhart, released on Avie Records in May 2006, features songs and solo piano music by Urquhart with tenor Michael Slattery and has received 5 stars from the BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM Magazine. He has performed throughout the United States and in Europe and in April 2006 made his first tour of Japan. In early 2006 Urquhart was named The New Jersey Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composer for 2006. Craig was chosen as a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in October 2005. He is a member of ASCAP, serves on the Board of Directors of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, is a Whisperings Artist, is a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammys), and is the Vice President of Public Relations and Promotion for The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.

Michael Webster: Audio Visual
Audio Visual is a mini-mystery, a song about fractured consciousness in a mediated world. The poetic voice is split into two — the contrapuntal situation shifts: canons, unisons, hocket, dovetailed lines, voices crossing. The harmony is familiar but for moments only: harmonic logic is always interrupted. The song ends with a question “how can we live inside the picture?” ...just so the final cadence is framed, contained, by a cadence in another key; the focus can’t be fixed. Audio Visual is the first in a three song cycle called Trio — flashes from a poet’s life in Los Angeles: TV, distant tombs, driving in the empty light.

Michael Webster is a Los Angeles-based composer. His recent work includes two operas Hell with poet Eileen Myles and The Side of the Mountain with Simon Leung, Fade on Family (a song without singers), a solo CD, Lotus Festival, an EP, Native Shrubs of the Santa Monica Mountains and Shakey’s, a performance work with Joe Sola. Webster has also written film soundtracks, (Goshogoaka, Army Ranger Reaching for New Spirit Warrior), songs for children’s television (Book of Pooh, Bear in the Big Blue House), and worked as an arranger, sideman, and occasional engineer (Tracy Chapman, Leo Kottke, Van Dyke Parks). He is currently working on a new opera.

Elliot Z. Levine: Five Duets
All of these duets were written as gifts. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Stopping By Woods” started out as solo songs. “Now You Will Feel No Rain” and “Amor Mío” were written for weddings. “yes is a pleasant country” started out as a sight-singing exercise which turned out to be a composition I felt like sharing. I like to explore the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of two voices interweaving. Having sung a lot of medieval and renaissance music I’ve always been awed and inspired by such composers as Landini, Josquin, Lassus and Morley. I often use these kinds of self-motivated projects either as warm-ups to working on larger pieces or as procrastination in dealing with the afore-mentioned.

Elliot Z. Levine has been the baritone for the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble since its inception in 1969. He has appeared as soloist with such groups as Musica Sacra, the Rome Opera, La Fenice, the Mannes Camerata, Music at Ascension, the Ensemble for Early Music, and the Folger Consort. He received his MMus from the Manhattan School of Music, his BA from Queens College and has studied conducting with Robert Hickok, composition with Robert Starer and at the Orff School in Salzburg, the Deller Academy in Avignon. He has been awarded five Meet-the-Composer Grants. For twenty-five years he has been a conductor and coach at Western Wind Workshops at Dartmouth and Smith Colleges, U Mass, and ACDA choral conferences around the country. He has been composer-in-residence at the Church of St. Thomas More in New York City, and the schools of Delmar NY. He is the cantorial soloist at Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, NY.

Martha Sullivan: from Sonette an Orpheus
These songs are the first of what will be a longer cycle of songs set to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus. The poet composed them as a memorial to Vera Knoop, a musician and dancer who died at the age of 20. This, Rilke’s mature poetry, speaks of art as it exists in time but also beyond time; whole histories occur in a mere sixteen lines. The imagery is at once specific and universal, so that the reader can make a personal connection to the text. I have done so by writing these songs with my own departed in mind. The first, “Zu unterst der Alte”, is for my father; the second, “Errichtet keinen Denkstein”, is for my close friend composer David Bieri; and the duet, “Nur wer die Leier schon hob”, is for poet and teacher Gerald Rich. In “Zu unterst der Alte”, Rilke describes the tangles of root and branch that comprise a single tree; the ramifying knots are also human fables and histories. The music shows the depths and ascents of the poetic line by twisting downward through chromatics and by rising up through horn calls. The poetry of “Errichtet keinen Denkstein” speaks for itself, particularly as a memorial to a composer. The musical gesture that represents Orpheus in the song is the repeated arpeggiation of chords, some of which occur (in a much calmer setting) in “Nur wer die Leier schon hob”. Several of the Sonette feature imagery of mirrors or pairing. In “Nur wer die Leier schon hob”, the pool creates the mirror reflection of life and afterlife, so the voices literally mirror each other in several places, or else chase each other through rising canons, to the steady accompaniment of the eternal lyre.

Martha Sullivan’s music has been praised as “vibrant” and “a singer’s favorite”. She has been commissioned by such leading voices in American choral music as the Dale Warland Singers and the Gregg Smith Singers (with whom she has been a resident composer for several years), as well as by the Esoterics (Seattle), Bella Voce (Reno), Chicago A Cappella, and Vocativ (Zurich, Switzerland). Her work has been championed by Stephen Tharp, the international organ recitalist, and recorded by Chicago A Cappella as well as by mezzo-soprano Virginia Dupuy. Ms. Sullivan is a co-founder and co-Artistic Director of the Pharos Music Project, a composers’ collective for new chamber and vocal music. She has been awarded several Meet the Composer grants for her work with Gregg Smith, and she won the Dale Warland Singers’ Choral Ventures competition in 2003, its final year.

The Wind and the Sky and the Road: Three Theater Songs by the Zellnik Brothers
Each of these songs was written for a different musical. The first (‘Why I Travel”) was inspired by the film (and book) Chocolat. The song introduces us to Vianne, a mysterious half-Mexican woman who has arrived in a small town in France to open a chocolate shop... The next song (“I’m Not Afraid”) is from the musical The Casebook of Hapsburg, R., which follows a young Sigmund Freud as he tries to grapple with, and understand, the suicide of his hero, Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 Vienna. In this song, the melancholic Crown Prince meets the girl he will eventually kill himself with: an intense and headstrong 16-year-old names Mary Vetsera. The final song (“Just True”) is from Yank!, a gay WW2 love story set in the South Pacific. Yank! explores the coming of age of a young army magazine photographer named Stu and his love affair with a seemingly straight private named Mitch. For more information on any of these works, please check out our web site here.

Joseph Zellnik (music) and his brother David Zellnik (lyrics) have been writing musicals together for over 10 years. Their musical Yank! was a big hit at the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival, with a completely sold-out run, and an Audience Favorite Award. Their previous musical, City of Dreams has been performed in Cardiff, Wales at the first Int’l Music Theatre Festival (picked from over 180 entries) as well as in New York at the Midtown International Theatre Festival (2002). It won the Nat’l Music Theatre Network competition and 2 songs from the show appear on Alison Fraser’s 2000 album Men In My Life. David and Joe recently created the musical First in Flight, about the Wright Brothers for TheaterworksUSA, which has received rave reviews from the New York Times and across the country on tour.

Gilda Lyons: Thy Lucifer
In medieval York, the great feast of Corpus Christi was a day of note: bells rang out over the city; high mass was attended by all; and citizens gathered – from dawn until dusk – for the presentation of the Mystery Plays. A cycle of forty-eight one-acts, each drama was assigned to the artisans’ guild best be suited to its telling, and members of the various guild halls would compete to produce the most elaborate stage designs.

When Daniel Gundlach invited me to adapt one of these Mystery Plays for two countertenors, it occurred to me that this unique instrumentation might be well-suited to the re-telling of the York Tanner’s Play “The Creation and Fall of Lucifer,” as I imagine the voice of deception to sound as sweet as the voice of God.

“The Creation and Fall of Lucifer” has frequently been told — as it was by the York Tanners — in straightforward terms of good and bad. However, before Lucifer became known as the embodiment of evil, he was once stunning in his purity: made most near after God, and named “bearer of light.” In re-telling the tale, I was concerned with catching the characters in the moments before they were divided: Here, there would be a place to imagine how close they might have been; how Lucifer might once have embodied beauty; how, with his fall, God might have experienced deep loss.

Thy Lucifer was completed on 22 July 2006 while in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.