SUSAN GRAHAM, MEZZO-SOPRANO JEREMY FRANK, PIANO · 2019-01-31 · A B O U T T H E A R T I S T 6 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2019, 8PM Segerstrom Center for the Arts | Renée and Henry

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2019, 8PM

Segerstrom Center for the Arts | Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall

SUSAN GRAHAM, MEZZO-SOPRANO

JEREMY FRANK, PIANO

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SEIT ICH IHN GESEHEN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Møte Edvard GRIEG (1843-1907)

Seitdem dein Aug’ in meines schaute Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)

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ER, DER HERRLICHSTE VON ALLEN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? John DANKWORTH (1927-2010)

Chanson d’amour Gabriel FAURÉ (1845-1924)

Melodi Ture RANGSTRÖM (1884-1947)

O you whom I often and silently come Ned Rorem (b. 1923)

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ICH KANN’S NICHT FASSEN, NICHT GLAUBEN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Jeg elsker dig Edvard GRIEG (1843-1907)

Au bord de l’eau Gabriel FAURÉ (1845-1924)

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DU RING AN MEINEM FINGER Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Rheinlegendchen Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)

Los dos miedos Joaquín TURINA (1882-1949)

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HELFT MIR, IHR SCHWESTERN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Mutter, Mutter, glaube nicht

Lass mich ihm am Busen hangen

Tout Gai! Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)

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Phidylé Henri DUPARC (1848-1933)

La Chevelure Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)

SÜSSER FREUND, DU BLICKEST MICH VERWUNDERT AN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

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Le Carafon Francis POULENC (1899-1963)

Lullaby Pyotr TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

Wiegenliedchen Richard STRAUSS (1863-1920)

AN MEINEM HERZEN, AN MEINER BRUST Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

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Absence Hector BERLIOZ (1803-1869)

La maja dolorosa (¡Oh muerte cruel!) Enrique GRANADOS (1867-1916)

How shall I your true love know? Roger QUILTER (1877-1953)

NUN HAST DU MIR DEN ERSTEN SCHMERZ GETAN Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)


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I. SEIT ICH IHN GESEHEN: “LOVECOMES IN AT THE EYE”

“And love comes in at the eye,” wrote WilliamButler Yeats: in this first group of three songs,lovers look at the beloved and are helpless to resistsuch beauty. In the “Amen”—chords at the startof Schumann’s Seit ich ihn gesehen, we hear thenameless woman’s reverence for the man she lovesbut believes is beyond her reach, hence the slighttinge of darkness and sadness in this music.Schumann had a passion for Bach, and hechannels Baroque tradition in this sarabande-song(the “sarabande” was a Baroque dance in triplemeter with the second and third beats often tied,usually grave in nature).

Love not yet admitted, much less acknowledged,in Schumann’s first song is taken several stepsfarther in Møte from Edvard Grieg’s famousHaugtussa cycle. In the first half of Arne Garborg’spoetic cycle, the clairvoyant heroine Veslemøy—called “Haugtussa,” or “hill sprite” for her ability tocommune with Nature—falls in love with the“wild boy” Jon. As she dreams of him on a hilltop,he appears, and she gazes at him entranced beforethey fall into one another’s arms. Her desirefor him at the start, the music saturatedwith chromatic motion in the inner voices (atraditional trope for desire), is consummated atthe end in their first tryst; we hear climax and the“dying-away” aftermath of lovemaking at the end.

“Since your eyes gazed in mine...what more couldI ask of life?”, the lover in Richard Strauss’Seitdem dein Aug’ in meines schaute asks.Strauss begins without a piano introduction, thedirectness very moving, and singles out the wordat the heart of it all—“Liebe,” “love”—by a vaultupwards for the singer, underscored by thefirst tonic chord of the song. The throbbingsyncopated patterns, the crescendo of risingpassion that builds throughout, and the rhythmicelongation of “ganzes Leben” (my whole life) are alltransformations of passion into song.

PRELUDE

Songs are bite-sized commentaries on andreflections of human existence. Whatever theirpurely musical attributes (and their greatness,or not, is dependent upon the composer’scompositional profundity), they participate in the“big things” of life: birth, death, love, hate,isolation, friendship, time, and more. Schumannknew this: in the year of his battle for ClaraWieck’s hand-in-marriage, he clearly thought longand hard about the vicissitudes of love andtranslated those thoughts into songs written forher, among them Frauenliebe und leben: a tale ofmarried love at its loveliest, from its beginnings inhumble abnegation through fulfillment to theinevitable ending in one partner’s death. Othercomposers in other countries have also sung oflove, courtship, marriage, birth, and grief; whattonight’s artists have done is to compile smallanthologies of diverse songs on the rites of passagegiven us at each stage of Schumann’s cycle.

“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, / ‘Tiswoman’s whole existence,” said Byron inDon Juan,and the poetic cycle Frauenliebe und leben bythe French aristocrat Louis Charles Adeläidede Chamisso de Boncourt, or Adelbert vonChamisso—when he was nine, his family fled theFrench Revolution for Prussia—might seem atfirst glance in accord with that peculiarlymasculine view of women. According to some, the“female” poetic voice in this cycle is actually male,and the work is meant to teach women how thepaterfamilias of the day wished to be worshippedby his wife. According to others (present companyincluded), the poems are actually in sympathywith the emerging women’s movement becauseit is the woman, not the husband, who is thenarrator; Chamisso was hailed in his time as achampion of women.While listeners will make uptheir own minds, it is undeniable that Schumannsaw in these words the occasion for great musicalbeauty. We hear a portrait in tones of a loving,tender, generous-hearted creature anyone wouldbe proud to love and to be loved by.


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III. ICH KANN’S NICHT FASSEN, NICHTGLAUBEN: AVOWALS OF LASTINGLOVE

Somewhere between the second and third songs inSchumann’s Frauenliebe, the beloved man hasdeclared his love for her, and she is overwhelmed.We hear her come to the realization that thiswonder is true in the course of this song, withits shifting moods and changing tempi;the astonishment at the start is succeeded by thesomewhat slower, thoughtful repetition of hiswords. “I can hardly grasp it, hardly believe it,”she repeats over and over; the final statement ispreceded by a remarkable little piano interlude,rocking back and forth between different levels asif to say “He loves me, he loves me not” before atlast accepting that love is hers.

In Grieg’s Jeg elsker dig, to words by HansChristian Andersen, a lover swears to love onlythe beloved through all eternity; the song wascomposed for the composer’s cousin NinaHagerup in the year of their engagement. Eachof the two stanzas culminates in a threefoldproclamation of love that rises ecstatically bystages. Somehow it seems appropriate that thesong is in C major (representing the ultimateclarity and purity of love) but is shot through withchromatic color and feeling, as in the lovelyintroduction.

In Au bord de l’eau, another poet also declares thathis love will endure for eternity, but Fauré’s music,like time itself, flows ever onward, in calmcontemplation of all those things that will pass—including this love. “My dear old au bord de l’eau,”Henri Duparc wrote to Fauré in 1883, soconsummately expressive of Fauré’s art is thissong.

IV. DU RING AN MEINEM FINGER:LOVERS’ RINGS AND WEDDINGNIGHTS

“To love him, serve him, belong wholly to him,”Frauenliebe’s nameless woman sings passionately

II. ER, DER HERRLICHSTE VON ALLEN:IN PRAISE OF THE BELOVED

In the second song of Frauenliebe, the womanin love catalogues her beloved’s wonderfulattributes—his lips, eyes, mind, and courage—andthen resolves to rejoice in her beloved’s fantasiedmarriage to someone else as long as he is happy.Trying to do the right thing, she nonethelessfinds it incredibly painful and weeps inprivate. Schumann was prone to invent wordlessextensions of poetic meaning in his pianopostludes, and this one is exquisite: in thecontrapuntal strands that drift downwards fromthe high treble register, we hear the wistfuldissolution of her dream of love.

The persona of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet,Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?, declaresthat as long as this poem shall exist, his belovedwill “live,” defying time and death. Shakespeareand jazz: one might not expect the combination,but the great British jazzman John Dankworthcomposed a wonderfully evocative setting of thissonnet for his wife, the jazz and pop singerCleo Laine.

Chanson d’amour is in “madrigal style,” with itsaccompaniment that suggests the strumming of alute or guitar and its time-traveling aura of anolder era. “I love, I love, I love each individual thingabout you,” this ardent lover proclaims, and Fauréaids and abets all this repetition for emphasis byrepeating the first stanza twice more in the courseof his setting.

Ture Rangström is one of the foremost early20th-century Swedish composers of romans(art song)—some 250 of them. Melodi is a settingof a love poem by Bo Bergman; here, love bringsNature to more intense life and banishes suffering.Nature’s sparkling voices ripple in the pianothroughout the song, accompanying a beautifulmelody; the words tell us that love itself is songand that it is all-powerful.


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siblings farewell, but happiness resumes its sway asshe goes to her husband. The wedding march wehear at the end owes a debt of gratitude to FelixMendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’sDream.

Schumann fashioned his song cycle Myrthen notafter the model of its Beethovenian or Schubertianpredecessors but according to his own uniquedesign, with 26 songs that constitute an alphabetof love. In the Lied der Braut I (“Mutter, Mutter,glaube nicht”), a bride reassures her mother,“I shan’t love you any less for marrying the manI love,” and thanks the woman who bore her for oran existence that has now become somethingsplendid. Schumann made a habit of extending thepoem wordlessly in his postlude, and this oneends with a beautiful Adagio variation on “suchsplendor.” The daughter-bride continues toreassure her mother in Lied der Braut II (Lassmich ihm am Busen hangen, set to chordal strainsas if the wedding march were already beginning tosound in the background.

At the start of the 20th century, a FrenchHellenist named Hubert Octave Pernot (1870-1946), in company with a Greek colleague namedPericles Matsa, collected Greek popular songs.The musicologist Pierre Aubry, who was giving alecture on the songs of the oppressed Greeksand Armenians, asked another musicologist,Michel Calvocoressi, to select some of Pernot’sGreek songs as illustrations. Calvocoressi taughtthe singer Louise Thomasset to produce thetexts phonetically; when she wanted pianoaccompaniments, he turned to Ravel, who wrotefive accompaniments in 36 hours—his first ofseveral forays into folklore. Tout gai! is anirresistible invitation to the dance, the text notquite coherent because sung while in full fling, thesinger distracted by the sight of lovely legs injoyous activity. Whatever the inimitably Frenchveil thrown over the proceedings by Ravel, wefeel as if transported to some sun-washed Greekvillage.

in mid-song she contemplates her wedding ring.This was the accepted model for matrimonial loveat the time, and the strong-minded ClaraWieck—no pushover, she—says such things inher letters to Robert. This fourth song is themirror of the second, the two sharing thesame key, some of the same harmonies, and the“heartbeat” chords in the right hand (in theinterior of this song).

Another ring figures prominently in GustavMahler’s Rheinlegendchen, one of his songs onfolk poems from the famous early 19th-centuryanthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’sMagic Horn): a lover separated from his belovedfantasizes throwing his ring into the Rhine, wherea fish will swallow it, and the King, when servedthat very same fish, will ask whose ring it is.The sweetheart at court, recognizing it,will immediately return to her faithful lover: theeternity symbol of the ring brings together truelovers who have been parted. In this song, we hearthe typically Mahlerian ironic disjunction betweenthe naiveté of the folk text and the extreme sophis-tication of the musical setting; Mahler himselfpointed out the originality of its harmonization.

Spain’s leading Romantic poet Ramón deCampoamor explored the oxymorons of love inhis Poem in the form of songs, set to music bythe Seville-born Joaquín Turina, who mergedsevillanismo with French influences (he studiedwith Vincent d’Indy at the Paris Conservatory).The third song, Los dos miedos, expresses fear ofthe beloved before the night of love and fear ofbeing without him after they have been together.

V. HELFT MIR, IHR SCHWESTERN:WEDDINGS, FAMILIES, ANDCOMMUNAL REJOICING

Returning to Frauenliebe, the woman now sings asong of rejoicing as her sisters help her withher bridal dress; in their company and on thisoccasion, she can safely confess her desire for herbeloved and his for her. Near the close, there is amomentary touch of melancholy as she bids her

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music rising in mini-waves of dawning realization,followed by a tender dialogue between her melodyand his cello-like wordless phrases in the left hand.

VII. SONGS TO THE CHILD: ANMEINEM HERZEN AN MEINER BRUST

The Russian poet Apollon Maikov paraphraseda Greek folk song, with echoes of Homericanimism, in a Lullaby set to music byTchaikovsky; here, a mother invokes mightyforces of Nature as guardians to keep her child safewhile it sleeps. The composer dedicated his songto Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s wife (she wasexpecting her first child), and it is deservedly a“chestnut,” in which the pianist rocks a cradle withboth hands in alternation, while the singer’smelody gently swings and sways in cradlingmotion as well.

La courte paille (The Short Straw) was FrancisPoulenc’s last song cycle, composed three yearsbefore his death for the soprano Denise Duval andher young son. Like Schumann’s Kinderszenen,these are songs about children rather than beingchildren’s music. In the sixth song, Le Carafon,everything in the world wants a darling baby, sothe wizard Merlin obligingly provides a watercarafe—it has, we are told, a lovely sopranovoice—with a pretty little infant carafe. Livelywhimsy and sweetness join hands in this song.A similar, somewhat gentlerwhimsy is on displayin Strauss Strauss’s Wiegenliedchen (one wouldnever guess from this song that his opera Salomewould follow only four years later), in which alittle bee and a spider are bidden to hum and spin“my little prince” to sleep. Again, we hear thecradle rocking in the piano as Strauss, in hisinimitable fashion, touches lightly upon manydifferent tonalities, as if on all the different shadesof maternal love.

Returning again to Frauenliebe, there is now evenmore love in the picture, that of a mother for theinfant daughter she nurses in An meinem Herzen,an meiner Brust. The two chords at the start, oneloud, one soft, open the doors of the bedchamber

VI. LOVEMAKING AND THE CREATIONOF A CHILD: SÜSSER FREUND, DUBLICKEST MICH

From the Parnassian poet Leconte de Lisle’sÉtudes latines (Latin Studies), Henri Duparcplucked Phydilé for one of his last and loveliestsongs. (Duparc composed only seventeen melodiesbefore falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenicdisease that prevented him from composing at allin the final forty-eight years of his life. As if incompensation for such a hideous fate, his songsare among the greatest in the French language,their subtlety and gravitas beyond the reach ofmost of his contemporaries.) At the start, refinedsensuality is evoked by limited motion toneighboring harmonies; from there, ravishmentproceeds apace. By the time the musical personabids his beloved “Repose” (Rest) three times insuccession, we are all of us seduced.

In 1894, the French poet Pierre Louÿs publishedLes Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of prose-poemssupposedly the work of Bilitis, a courtesan inancient Greece at the time of Sappho; the poemswere, he wrote, discovered in her tomb bya German archeologist named G. Heim (“geheim,”or “secret”). Louÿs, of course, was the actualauthor. The text of La Chevelure comes from thefirst section entitled “Bucolics,” about Bilitis’schildhood and her first sexual encounter with theyouth Lykas: his narrative of seduction, quotedwithin the song, makes Bilitis a figment of hisimagination, but she ultimately contains his dreamwithin her own recounting. In this intensely eroticscenario, it is no wonder that we encounterWagner’s famous “Tristan” chord at the momentof imagined—soon to be actual—climax.

In Schumann’s Süsser Freund, du blickest mich,the woman tells her bewildered husband, who hasfound her both weeping and smiling, that sheis pregnant. This is the only song where he ispresent, and Schumann disposes the piano partat times as a dialogue between treble and bassregisters, between man and wife. It is in the pianothat she whispers her glad tidings into his ear, the


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The ferocious minor chord at the start ofNun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan couldhardly be more of a shock. Schumann knew thataccusatory anger and a sense of betrayal are amongthe whirlwind of emotions we feel when someonebeloved dies, and that is what we hear first in thissearing song. The initial bitterness gives way tomore inward grief and finally, to one ofSchumann’s most heart-stopping compositionaldecisions: the wordless return of the first song inthe postlude. Only the accompaniment, not thevocal line, returns—half a song for a life deprivedof half of its meaning. We are meant to hear theslight musical “bump,” the transition from thepresent to the past as she remembers the start of itall, eight songs and a lifetime ago.

—Program notes by Dr. Susan Youens

and allow us access to this intimate scene, uniquein German song. In another of Schumann’sexpressive postludes, we hear both waves of tendermaternal feeling and the physical motion as thechild is swung gently up and down.

VIII. SONGS OF GRIEF ANDMOURNING: NUN HAST DU MIR DENERSTEN SCHMERZ GETAN

In the same year of 1840 as Frauenliebe undleben, Hector Berlioz composed his song cycleLes nuits d’été, for what reason, we do not know:to make some money? as a vehicle for one of Paris’sfamous mezzos (Pauline Viardot, perhaps)? as aparting gift for its poet, en route to Spain?Whatever the reasons, the fourth song, L’Absence,is a plangent lament by someone parted from hisbeloved by great distance; in this context, we canimagine it as the distance of final illness, separatingthe living from the dead. Over and over, the singerimplores, “Return, return, my dear beloved,”and over and over, a brief silence follows—noone answers—before the singer resumes thegrief-stricken plaint.

Enrique Granados was inspired by the Spanishtradition of theatre songs called tonadillas tocreate his own Tonadillas en estilo antiguo, inwhich majas and majos (near-untranslatable termsfor the arrogant, boisterous, charming, proudworking-class young men and women of Madrid,who engaged in complex games of courtship alonga gamut from white-hot passion to white-hotcontempt) sing of love. The weightiest are thethree songs in the mini-cycle La maja dolorosa, inwhich a maja grieves for her dead majo. The firstsong, ¡Oh muerte cruel! , begins by strikingiron-hard, heavy tones in the piano—we will heara similar harsh blow at the start of Schumann’s lastsong—followed by a cry of protest that beginsin the heights and descends into the depths ofdepression: she does not wish to live any longer.The same progression, from tragic outcry todeadened quietude, is then repeated, and thepiano postlude recapitulates in brief the sameterrible, truthful contrast.


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SUSAN GRAHAMMEZZO-SOPRANO

Susan Graham—hailed as “an artist to treasure”by the New York Times—rose to the highestechelon of international performers within justa few years of her professional debut, masteringan astonishing range of repertoire and genresalong the way. Her operatic roles span four cen-turies, from Monteverdi’s Poppea to SisterHelen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead ManWalking, which was written especially for her.A familiar face at New York’s MetropolitanOpera, she also maintains a strong internation-al presence at such key venues as Paris’ Théâtre

du Châtelet, the Sydney Opera House, SantaFe Opera and the Hollywood Bowl. She won aGrammy Award for her collection of Ives songs,and her recital repertoire is so broad that 14composers from Purcell to Sondheim arerepresented on her most recent Onyx album,Virgins, Vixens & Viragos. This distinctlyAmerican artist has also been recognizedthroughout her career as one of the foremostexponents of French vocal music. Although anative of Texas, she was awarded the Frenchgovernment’s prestigious “Chevalier de la

BY DARIO ACOSTA


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Légion d’Honneur,” both for her popularity asa performer in France and in honor of hercommitment to French music.

To launch the 2018-19 season, Grahamreunited with Andris Nelsons and the BostonSymphony for performances of Mahler’s ThirdSymphony in Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Lucerne,Paris, and London, at the BBC Proms. Back inthe United States, she made her role debutas Humperdinck’s Witch in Doug Fitch’streatment of Hansel and Gretel at LA Operaand returned to Carnegie Hall for Mozart’sRequiem and Haydn’s ”Nelson Mass” withthe Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Further concertengagements see the mezzo reprise hersignature interpretations of four great Frenchsong cycles: Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergnewith the Sydney Symphony and DavidRobertson; Chausson’s Poéme de l’amour et dela mer with Florida’s Naples Philharmonic andAndrey Boreyko; Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été withthe Houston Symphony and Ludovic Morlot;and the same composer’s La mort de Cléopâtrewith the New Zealand Symphony underEdo de Waart. In recital, she sings Mahlerand Berlioz at the Santa Fe ChamberMusic Festival, while her Schumann-inspiredFrauenliebe und-leben: Variations program is thevehicle for dates in the United States andat Australia’s Adelaide Festival.

Last season, Graham partnered Renée Flemingfor the San Francisco Symphony’s opening-night gala, and joined Anna Netrebko, PlácidoDomingo, and a host of other luminaries to cel-ebrate the Metropolitan Opera’s five decades atits Lincoln Center home. Having created therole of Sister Helen Prejean in the world pre-miere production of Dead Man Walking, shestarred inWashington National Opera’s revivalof the opera, making her triumphant role debutas the convict’s mother. She returned to SantaFe Opera as Prince Orlofsky in a new produc-

tion of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, andreprised her signature portrayal of Dido inBerlioz’s Les Troyens at Chicago’s Lyric Opera.Her concert highlights included selections fromMahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn at CarnegieHall and from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergnewith the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as astar-studded Der Rosenkavalier at the BostonSymphony. She gave U.S. recitals of Frauenliebeund-leben Variations, her program inspiredby the Schumann song cycle, and expandedher discography with Nonesuch Records’DVD/Blu-ray release of William Kentridge’snew treatment of Berg’s Lulu, which capturesher celebrated role debut as CountessGeschwitz at the Met.

Graham’s earliest operatic successes were insuch trouser roles as Cherubino in Mozart’s Lenozze di Figaro. Her technical expertise soonbrought mastery of Mozart’s more virtuosicroles, like Sesto in La clemenza di Tito,Idamante in Idomeneo and Cecilio in Lucio Silla,as well as the title roles of Handel’s Ariodanteand Xerxes. She went on to triumph in twoiconic Richard Strauss mezzo roles, Octavian inDer Rosenkavalier and the Composer inAriadneauf Naxos. These brought her to prominence onall the world’s major opera stages, including theMet, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San FranciscoOpera, Covent Garden, Paris Opera, La Scala,Bavarian State Opera, Vienna State Opera andthe Salzburg Festival, among many others. Inaddition to creating the role of Sister HelenPrejean at San Francisco Opera, she sang theleading ladies in the Met’s world premieres ofJohn Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and TobiasPicker’s An American Tragedy, and madeher Dallas Opera debut as Tina in a newproduction of The Aspern Papers by DominickArgento. As Houston Grand Opera’s LynnWyatt Great Artist, she starred as PrinceOrlofsky in the company’s first staging ofDie Fledermaus in 30 years, before heading an


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all-star cast as Sycorax in the Met’s Baroquepastiche The Enchanted Island and making herrapturously received musical theater debut in anew production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’sThe King and I at the Théâtre du Châtelet inParis.

It was in an early Lyon production of Berlioz’sBéatrice et Bénédict that Graham scored particu-lar raves from the international press, and a tri-umph in the title role of Massenet’s Chérubin atCovent Garden sealed her operatic stardom.Further invitations to collaborate on Frenchmusic were forthcoming from many of its pre-eminent conductors, including Sir Colin Davis,Charles Dutoit, James Levine and Seiji Ozawa.New productions of Gluck’s Iphigénie enTauride, Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust andMassenet’s Werther were mounted for themezzo in New York, London, Paris, Chicago,San Francisco and beyond. She recently madetitle role debuts in Offenbach’s comic master-pieces La belle Hélène andThe Grand Duchess ofGerolstein at Santa Fe Opera, as well as provingherself the standout star of the Met’s star-stud-ded revival of Les Troyens, which was broadcastlive to cinema audiences worldwide in the com-pany’s celebrated “Live in HD” series. Graham’saffinity for French repertoire has not been lim-ited to the opera stage, also serving as the foun-dation for her extensive concert and recitalcareer. Such great cantatas and symphonic songcycles as Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre and Lesnuits d’été, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Chausson’sPoème de l’amour et de la mer provide opportu-nities for collaborations with the world’s leadingorchestras, and she makes regular appearanceswith the New York Philharmonic, BostonSymphony, Orchestre de Paris and LondonSymphony Orchestra.

Graham’s distinguished discography features allthe works described above, as well as a series oflauded solo albums, including Un frisson

français, a program of French song recordedwith pianist Malcolm Martineau for Onyx;C’est ça la vie, c’est ça l’amour!, an album of 20th-century operetta rarities on Erato; and La BelleÉpoque, an award-winning collection of songsby Reynaldo Hahn with pianist RogerVignoles, from Sony Classical. Among themezzo’s numerous honors are MusicalAmerica’s Vocalist of the Year and an OperaNews Award, while Gramophone magazine hasdubbed her “America’s favorite mezzo.”

JEREMY FRANK, PIANO

Jeremy Frank has established himself as one ofhis generation’s most respected pianists andvocal coaches. He has collaborated with manyof the United States’ major opera houses onproductions spanning the operatic repertoirefrom Monteverdi to Wagner to world pre-mieres of operas by composers Mark Adamo,Daniel Catán, and Michael John LaChiusa.

Jeremy Frank is an Assistant Conductor andthe Associate Chorus Master at Los AngelesOpera. He has assisted renowned MaestrosJames Conlon, Stephen Lord, Carlo Rizzi,Patrick Summers, Pablo Heras-Casado, GrantGershon and Plácido Domingo, among manyothers. Mr. Frank regularly works atWolf TrapOpera Company, and in 2013 preparedWagner’s Ring Cycle at Seattle Opera. He alsoassists in the preparation of operas and vocalchamber music at the LA Phil.

Mr. Frank has appeared in recital with DavidDaniels, Eric Owens, Brandon Jovanovich,Rodell Rosell, Delora Zajick, Kate Lindsey andSondra Radvanovsky. He also performed withJoyce DiDonato at the 54th GRAMMYAwards, the first time the ceremony featured aperformance by a classical singer. He is the


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Curator and Pianist for the Fine Tuning RecitalSeries atWolf Trap Opera Company, where hecreates and performs eclectic programs toaccompany and illuminate the mainstagerepertoire. Mr. Frank has also appeared asa recitalist in the Vocal Colors Series,co-sponsored by the Wolf Trap OperaCompany and the Phillips Collection inWashington D.C.

Dedicated to the development of young andemerging artists, Mr. Frank is a member of thefaculty of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein YoungArtist Program at Los Angeles Opera. He hasbeen a guest faculty member for the young artistprograms at Utah Opera and Seattle Opera. Hehas been a guest coach at the University ofSouthern California and taught at the JuilliardSchool, where he was an Associate Coach. In2012, Mr. Frank was invited by the AmericanEmbassy in Russia to teach masterclasses andperform concerts with members of the GalinaVishnevskaya Opera Institute in Moscow andSt. Petersburg.

Mr. Frank is a graduate of several of thecountry’s premiere training programs, includingthe San Francisco Opera Center, the HoustonGrand Opera Studio and the Music Academyof the West. He received a Bachelor of Musicdegree in piano performance and a language cer-tificate in French from St. Olaf College, MNwhere he was a National Merit Scholar andPresidential Scholar, graduating summa cumlaude. He received his Master of Music degreein piano performance from the ClevelandInstitute of Music, and earned a SpecialistDegree in Piano Accompanying and ChamberMusic from the University of Michigan, wherehe was a student of Martin Katz.


Documents

SUSAN GRAHAM, MEZZO-SOPRANO JEREMY FRANK, PIANO · 2019-01-31 · A B O U T T H E A R T I S T 6 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2019, 8PM Segerstrom Center for the Arts | Renée and Henry