CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Danielle De Niese
Ken Noda

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Danielle de Niese, Soprano
New York Recital Debut
Ken Noda, Piano

HANDEL "Endless Pleasure, Endless Love" from Semele, HWV 58
HANDEL "Myself I Shall Adore" from Semele, HWV 58
GRIEG Selections from Haugtussa, Op. 67
·· It Sings
·· Blueberry Hill
·· Love
·· Evil Day
·· By Gjætle Brook
WOLF "Verborgenheit" from Mörike Lieder
WOLF "Gesegnet sei, durch den die Welt enstund" from Italienisches Liederbuch
WOLF "Wie lange schon war immer mein Verlangen" from Italienisches Liederbuch
WOLF "In dem Schatten meiner Locken" from Spanisches Liederbuch
WOLF "Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen" from Italienisches Liederbuch
POULENC Selections from Fiançailles pour rire, FP 101
·· Il Vole
·· Violon
·· Fleurs
BARBER "Solitary Hotel" from Despite and Still, Op. 41
BARBER "Sleep Now" from Three Songs, Op. 10
BARBER "Nuvoletta," Op. 25
BIZET "Chanson d’avril"
BIZET "La coccinelle"
BIZET "Tarentelle"

Encores:
WILLIAM BOLCOM "Amor" from Cabaret Songs
PORTER "I Hate Men" from Kiss Me, Kate

This concert is made possible by The Ruth Morse Fund for Vocal Excellence.

Program Notes:

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL (1685–1759)
“Endless Pleasure” and “Myself I Shall Adore,” from Semele

Handel’s Semele is a mythological opera derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and thinly veiled as an English oratorio. William Congreve, who wrote the words, was, after all, the author of Love for Love and The Way of the World, dramas that exemplify the sophisticated sexual comedy of manners popular in the late 17th century, and Handel’s contrapuntal choruses fail to cancel out the erotic atmosphere and saucy allusions regnant in much of Semele. In “Endless Pleasure,” Jupiter’s mistress Semele sings of amorous appetite, of sexuality that can disarm gods (and monarchs), depriving them of their weapons and distracting them from their duties of governance. Londoners in Handel’s day would have recognized the allusions to the Hanoverian monarch George II’s mistress Madame Sophia de Walmoden, Countess of Yarmouth, the moralistic warning that she should not expect to rise any higher than she already had. In the third act, a distinctly displeased Juno, Jupiter’s wife, comes to Semele disguised as Semele’s sister Ino. Juno persuades Semele, delighted with the false image of herself as a goddess in Juno’s magic mirror, to ask Jupiter to appear to her in his own godly guise, a sight no mortal can bear without dying, and grant her immortality. Semele sings “Myself I Shall Adore” while gazing in the mirror, long an emblem of vanitas. Tellingly, it is on the word “gazing” that she goes into frothy ecstasies: narcissism clad in gorgeous melody.


EDVARD GRIEG (1843–1907)
Selections from Haugtussa

“I loved a young woman with a marvelous voice and an equally marvelous gift as an interpreter. This woman became my wife ... my songs came to life naturally and through a necessity like that of natural law, and all of them were written for her.” So wrote Grieg of his wife Nina in a letter of 1900 to his first American biographer Henry Finck. Grieg mostly set to music poetry from his native Norway, including his famous song cycle Haugtussa, on poems by Arne Garborg, a journalist, novelist, and poet who championed the use of landsmal, or “New Norwegian,” as a literary language. Garborg was thrilled: “I just wanted to tell you that I have now finally heard the Haugtussa songs properly sung … and I love them more than I can tell you. It is precisely this deep, soft, subdued character—the music of the underworld—that I in my way have tried to express in words, but that you have really captured.” His poetic cycle consists of 71 poems, many of which celebrate the landscape of Jaeren in southwest Norway; his clairvoyant heroine Veslemoy is called “Haugtussa,” or “hill sprite,” for her ability to commune with the soul of nature. The first half of Garborg’s cycle has to do with her life, her resistance to the dark powers of the visionary underworld, and her love for the “wild boy” Jon and the grief his eventual betrayal causes. The first song of Grieg’s much smaller cycle, “Det syng” (“It Is Singing”), is a siren song sung to Veslemoy by the spirit of the Blue Hill, who desires her and tries to persuade her to join it. When Grieg begins the cycle with trills and a silvery ascent into the empyrean in the piano, we realize just how seductive his nature magic can be. In the third song, “Blabaer-Li” (“Blueberry Hill”), Haugtussa happens unexpectedly on a blueberry patch while herding her cows and fantasizes about who might come to share the berries and how she would receive them—bear, fox, wolf, or the “boy from Skare-Brote.” The fifth song, “Elsk” (Love), is a love song that tells of her passion for the “wild lad [who] has ensnared my soul,” but who betrays her by the seventh song, “Vond Dag” (“Painful Day”). In the eighth and last song of the cycle, “Ved Gjaetle-Bekken” (“At Gjaetle Brook”), Veslemoy goes to her brook confidante (shades of Die schöne Müllerin) who helps her to dream, remember, forget, and finally sleep; the limpid, delicate waters in the piano would lull anyone, no matter how grief-stricken.


HUGO WOLF (1860–1903)
“Verbogenheit,” from Mörike-Lieder; “Gesegnet sei, durch den die Welt enstund,” “Wie lange schon war immer mein Verlangen,” and “Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen,” from Italienisches Liederbuch; “In dem Schatten meiner Locken, from Spanisches Liederbuch”

On February 16, 1888, in Perchtoldsdorf (near Vienna), the great song composer Hugo Wolf composed the first of his 53 songs to poems by Eduard Mörike: “Göttlicher Mörike!” (Divine Mörike), Wolf called him, adding that this poetry “is written with blood, and such tones can only strike someone who, suffering, surrenders his innermost being to deeply truthful knowledge.” The songs were composed with astonishing rapidity; the dazed, exuberant composer dashed off notes to his friends to report on each day’s triumph, declaring that one song was “of such intensity that it would lacerate the nervous system of a block of marble.” “What I write now, dear friend, I write for posterity too,” he said, and his prophecy was correct. In “Verborgenheit,” with its plea for privacy in which to experience inner extremes of pain and rapture, we hear Wolf both assimilating Wagner’s and Schumann’s influences and going beyond them to what he called “Wölferl’s own howl”—his own voice. The Italienisches Liederbuch is the last sizeable song anthology Wolf composed in his brief creative life; he attained full compositional maturity in 1888 with the Mörike songs and lapsed into insanity in September 1897. His texts for this songbook came from an anthology of Italian folk poems translated into German and published in 1860 by the Nobel Prize–winning writer Paul Heyse (1830–1914); most of the poems are Tuscan rispetti, a form of poetry in which one says the same thing several times, such that a lover’s compliments or reproaches are doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Wolf arranged his 46 songs to suggest the history of a love affair, one in which the man generally sings worshipful love songs and a spirited woman longs for him, mocks him, and finally ends it when her exasperation is beyond bounds. “Gesegnet sei, durch den die Welt entstund” is often sung by men—but why shouldn’t a woman sing this meltingly tender song of praise to the God who made “beauty and your face”? Wolf always fashioned his comic songs as a commentary on his own musical situation as a post-Wagnerian composer in late-19th-century Vienna. In the 11th song, “Wie lange schon war immer mein Verlangen,” a woman swoons in Wagnerian desire for her peaches-and-cream milksop of a lover, who minces onto the musical stage in the piano postlude and plays a ridiculously trivial, stumble-bum solo on the “violin.” Returning to the Italian Songbook at the end of this group, we realize that Wolf knew how to leave an audience both laughing and properly impressed by a display of virtuosity. “In dem Schatten meiner Locken” comes from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch, a songbook containing 10 religious songs and 34 secular songs. The poems both by famous Spanish writers and anonymous folk poets come from Paul Heyse’s and Emanuel Geibel’s (1815–1884) poetic anthology of 1852, a source popular with 19th-century composers, including Schumann and Brahms. Here, a woman sings this song with her lover asleep at her breast and shadowed by her long hair. The pair has made love (the wind of passion has tousled her locks) a short time before and will do so again to the same script on his part; the hint of teasing ennui adds to the evident eroticism the spice of ambiguity that so attracted the psychologically inclined Wolf, a resident of Freud’s Vienna. In “Ich hab’ in Penna,” a woman who has heaped fire-and-brimstone imprecations on her ex-lover’s head in the song just before this one boasts of her multiple lovers in this, that, and the other town. Wolf had learned from Schumann how to make the piano postludes of songs maximal; emotions no longer constrained by language spill over into especially intense manifestations in the instrumental ending. Here, no one could mistake the compound of glee, triumph, and virtuosic one-upsmanship in the postlude—“so there” indeed.


FRANCIS POULENC (1899–1963)
Selections from Fiançailles pour rire

Francis Poulenc, born into a well-to-do Parisian family, enacted in his songs a back-and-forth pull between grave beauty and a hedonistic vivacity of inimitably French flavor. He met Louise de Vilmorin—a friend of Jean Cocteau and, at the end of her life, the companion of the statesman André Malraux (she called herself “Marilyn Malraux”)—in 1934 when he had resolved to compose songs not only for Pierre Bernac’s baritone voice but for female singers. For that, he preferred poetry by a woman and sang (literally) the praises of Vilmorin’s “sensitive impertinence, libertinage, and appetite.” In the cycle Fiançailles pour rire of 1939, Poulenc recruits Vilmorin in order to enchant us, to provide a world at war (then and now) with gaiety and love. “Il vole” depends on the double meaning of the French verb “voler” as “to fly” and “to steal:” the lover who steals her heart leaves (flies away) and does not return her love. Poulenc sets Vilmorin’s words “in the style of a piano étude,” a fiendishly difficult one at that; this racy song literally races along. Tongue-in-cheek, Poulenc recommends numerous rehearsals. In 1938 Vilmorin had married a Hungarian playboy-aristocrat, Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd; when the marriage broke up, she became the mistress of another Hungarian nobleman, Thomas Paul Esterházy de Galántha, who left his wife for her in 1942. For “Violon,” Poulenc tells us that he had a Hungarian restaurant on the Champs-Elysées in mind, complete with gypsy violinist but with Paris predominating over Hungary stylistically; this is a French song. “Fleurs,” the final song of the cycle, is one of those grave songs of love and loss—a coda in every sense—that no one else but Poulenc could have composed. The pianist’s calm, even chords are like heartbeats, carrying us from measure to measure as life carries us from hour to hour.


SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981)
“Solitary Hotel,” from Despite and Still, Op. 41; “Sleep Now,” from Three Songs, Op. 10; “Nuvoletta,” Op. 25

Samuel Barber’s uncle was the song composer Sidney Homer, his aunt was the noted opera singer Louise Homer, and he himself contemplated a career as a singer in his youth, so it is not surprising that songs and operas dominate in his śuvre. His attraction to Celtic literature began in his teens, when he first discovered the poems of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and James Stephen. Joyce was a particular favorite, and “Solitary Hotel,” from the Joyce song cycle Despite and Still, tells the tale of a coup de foudre, of a young man’s sudden passion for an unknown young woman he spies in a hotel, in the most telegraphic manner imaginable; the mise-en-scène, dramatis personae, and setting are limned in the fewest possible words. It was Barber’s witty invention to have his singer recount these evocative fragments against the backdrop of a tango, lest anyone fail to note that it is passion at issue here. “Sleep Now”—one of Barber’s most haunting songs—begins with hypnotic swaying back and forth as the persona tries to lull his unquiet heart into peaceful sleep; in the middle of the song, however, he must do battle with winter’s icy blast, which has its own counter-incantation to bar all sleep before rest is finally granted in the piano postlude. Barber described “Nuvoletta” tongue-in-cheek as “a slightly ironic song,” the irony evident when the character in this virtuosic waltz-song sighs “as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus” and Barber quotes the “Desire” or “Longing” leitmotif from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in the bass. Joycean puns and word transformations are everywhere (“Ah dew! Ah dew!,” a “place” called “Grasyaplaina” or “Gratia plena,” “She cancelled all her engauzements”), but the ultimate transformation is that this is a death song, a song of suicide.


GEORGES BIZET (1837–1875)
“Chanson d’avril”; “La coccinelle”; “Tarantelle”

Georges Bizet is, of course, world-famous for his operas Carmen and The Pearl Fishers, but his songs merit attention as well. “Chanson d’avril” beautifully evokes the rustlings of spring upon its arrival, while in “La coccinelle” a bashful 16-year-old boy loses his nerve. Although he realizes that the young beauty with the ladybug on her snowy neck wants him to kiss her, he is too shy to actually do it. The insect gets the last word, reproaching the lad for his all-too-human stupidity. Bizet sets the scene at a ball with the pianist transmogrified into an off-stage orchestra playing a waltz. And finally, “Tarentelle” comes to us via the dramatist and minor poet Edouard Pailleron, whose frothy poem on love and flight (not at all like the Poulenc-Vilmorin song-étude) is overwhelmed by flowery fioritura … and who could possibly object?

© 2009 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Danielle de Niese, Soprano
New York Recital Debut
Soprano Danielle de Niese’s career got off to a prodigious start with early operatic debuts at the Netherlands Opera, the Saito Kinen Festival, and the Paris Opera. But it was her portrayal of Cleopatra in a David McVicar production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare (conducted by William Christie) for her 2005 Glyndebourne Festival debut that brought true international acclaim. Her musicality and stage presence have brought her to the edge of a spectacular career, capped by the recent signing of an exclusive recording contract with Decca Records.

The 2008–2009 season finds Ms. de Niese making her house and role debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Galatea in Acis and Galatea and her Austrian debut at the Theater an der Wien as Ginevra in Ariodante. She returns to the Metropolitan Opera, in the acclaimed Mark Morris production of Orefo ed Euridice opposite Stephanie Blythe, and Glyndebourne as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare with Emmanuelle Haïm and opposite Sarah Connolly as Giulio Cesare. In addition, Ms. de Niese will conduct a coast-to-coast recital tour that begins at the legendary Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City, Missouri, and includes appearances at Cal Performances in Berkeley, California.

Ms. de Niese has been captivating audiences since childhood, when she was a fixture of Los Angeles local television hosting a weekly arts showcase for teenagers, for which she won an Emmy Award. While training in the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, she made her house debut at age 19 as Barbarina in a new Jonathan Miller Le nozze di Figaro with Renée Fleming, Bryn Terfel, and Cecilia Bartoli as cast mates. James Levine, who conducted, subsequently invited her to sing the title role of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges in addition to concerts with The MET Chamber Ensemble. Other early engagements included Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi at Los Angeles Opera and Nannetta in Falstaff for Santa Fe Opera, as well as concerts with the New York Philharmonic, The Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony.

Ms. de Niese has made important European debuts, including Cleopatra for both the Netherlands Opera and the Paris Opera (opposite David Daniels) conducted by Marc Minkowski; Rameau’s Les indes galantes under William Christie in Paris; a contemporary work by Robin de Raaff, staged by Pierre Audi, in the Netherlands; Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice for the Teatro San Carlo in Naples; and Monteverdi’s Poppea in Zurich under Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Recent house debuts include the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Théâtre de la Monnaie as Cleopatra, the Canadian Opera Company in the title role of Handel’s Rodelinda conducted by Harry Bicket, and Suntory Hall as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro with Nicola Luisotti. Return engagements include Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and in the Pierre Audi production of L’incoronazione di Poppea in Amsterdam, Giulio Cesare at the Metropolitan Opera, Ginevra in Ariodante at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and Monteverdi’s Poppea and Tytania in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Chicago Opera Theater. She also returned to Glyndebourne in the title role of L’incoronazione di Poppea under the direction of French early-music sensation Emmanuelle Haïm which included a concert at the Proms at Royal Albert Hall.

Additional orchestral engagements include appearances with Opera Fuoco at the Concertgebouw, her Mostly Mozart debut at the Barbican with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and a concert of works by Handel with the Venice Baroque Orchestra at the Festival del Sole in Cortona, Italy.

Born in Australia to parents of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, Danielle de Niese grew up in Los Angeles. Trained in dance and piano as well as music at the famed Colburn School in Los Angeles, she participated in the Tanglewood, Aspen, and Marlboro summer programs before coming to New York in 1997. While still a freshman at the Mannes School of Music, she became, at age 18, the youngest artist ever to enter the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Program.

Ken Noda, Piano
Ken Noda is Musical Assistant to James Levine on the Artistic Administration staff of the Metropolitan Opera. He began working there in 1991 after retiring from a full-time performing career as a concert pianist.

Born to Japanese parents in October 1962, Mr. Noda studied with Daniel Barenboim and performed as a soloist with such orchestras as the Berlin, Vienna, New York, Israel, and Los Angeles philharmonics; the London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, and National symphonies; The Cleveland Orchestra; Orchestre de Paris; and Philharmonia Orchestra of London, under such conductors as Abbado, Barenboim, Chailly, Kubelik, Levine, Mehta, Ozawa, and Previn. He has also collaborated as a chamber musician with Mr. Levine (including music for two pianos four hands), Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Nigel Kennedy, and the Emerson String Quartet; in addition, he has performed as an accompanist to Kathleen Battle, Hildegard Behrens, Maria Ewing, Aprile Millo, Kurt Moll, Jessye Norman, Dawn Upshaw, and Deborah Voigt.

Since 1999 he has participated every summer at the Marlboro Music Festival and also teaches at the Renata Scotto Opera Academy at the invitation of Miss Scotto. At the Met he devotes much of his time to the training of young singers in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and also gives master classes at Juilliard, Yale, and at the Ravinia Festival / Steans Institute.