CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Jessica Rivera
Maryanne Kim

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Jessica Rivera, Soprano
Maryanne Kim, Piano
Todd Palmer, Clarinet

IAN KROUSE Cantar de los Cantares
BARBER Hermit Songs, Op. 29
·· At St. Patrick's Purgatory
·· Church Bell at Night
·· Saint Ita's Vision
·· The Heavenly Banquet
·· The Crucifixion
·· Sea-Snatch
·· Promiscuity
·· The Monk and His Cat
·· The Praises of God
·· The Desire for Hermitage
SCHUBERT Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D.965
NICO MUHLY The Adulteress (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)

Carnegie Hall commissions in the 2008-2009 season are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Program Notes:

IAN KROUSE (b. 1956) Cantar de los Cantares

American composer Ian Krouse has received many awards, including three opera development grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several from the American Composer’s Forum and Meet the Composer, as well as from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. His works have been performed internationally. 

Krouse received a bachelors degree, and performer and composer certificates from Indiana University at South Bend; he later earned a masters and a Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition at the University of Southern California. He is currently a Professor of Music at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Cantar de los Cantares, a song cycle written in 2007, uses text adapted from a Spanish translation of the “Song of Songs” by Jessica Rivera and the composer, using the King James English translation modified by Krouse and Kristin Rothfuss. It was requested by and dedicated to Jessica Rivera, who, with clarinetist Eleanore Weingartner and pianist L. Mark Carver, gave its premiere at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in July 2007.
 
The composer explains that in this cycle about love, “though the emphasis here is (fittingly) mainly from the female perspective, the singer, at times, also sings the role of the male as well, retaining something of the compelling dialogue format of the original Hebrew poem. The clarinet, naturally, plays off the soprano in the ‘role’ of the male lover, imparting an almost quasi-operatic mood throughout. The work is set in two parts, with a brief pause in between. As much ‘solo cantata’ as song cycle, the work is also structured as a sonata, with an interesting twist—the first theme is the ‘feminine’ and the second is the ‘masculine,’ a reversal of the stereotypical Romantic-era concept of the form!”

—Susan Halpern

Susan Halpern contributes program notes to numerous musical organizations.


SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981) Hermit Songs, Op. 29

Messiaen’s near contemporary Samuel Barber belonged to a family whose Irish origins he took to heart, choosing poems by James Stephens and James Joyce for some of the first songs he published. After his first visit to the place, in summer 1952, he set about making more Irish songs, to poems that monks in the middle ages had inscribed in the margins of holy books they were copying. “They are small poems,” he wrote in his preface to the published music, “thoughts or observations, some very short, and speak in starightforward, droll, and often suprisingly modern terms of the simple life these men led, close to nature, to animals, and to God.”

The poems came from three published collections: The Romanesque Lyric, with translations by Howard Mumford Jones (Nos. 5 and 2, which were the first Barber set, in that order), Kenneth Jackson’s A Celtic Miscellany (Nos. 6 and 7) and Seán Ó Faoláin’s anthology The Silver Branch for the rest—though in three cases Barber had the translations redone by his friends W. H. Auden (Nos. 8 and 9) and Chester Kallman (No. 3). Begun in late October 1952, the cycle was completed the following February, the two Auden numbers coming last. Barber, who started looking for a singer only when the work was finished, was delighted by the young Leontyne Price’s interpretation, and performed the cycle with her several times.

Certain archaisms reflect the culture the poems came from: bell sounds, bare fifths and fourths, and an absence of time signatures. The music can thereby adapt itself to changing meters, which are found in these post-Yeats translations as much as in the texts of plainsong. What the notation also facilitates is a degree of rhythmic conflict between voice and piano at times—an element that might suggest the swing of popular song, and that underscores the thoroughly 20th-century character of Barber’s music. The ancient echoes are in the distance. We are not listening to long-gone monks here, but to their thoughts chiming in a modern soul.

—Paul Griffiths

Paul Griffiths is the author of numerous books on music, including The
New Penguin Dictionary of Music and, most recently, A Concise History
of Western Music (Cambridge University Press).


FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828) Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D. 965

Written in October 1828, this work is probably the last Schubert ever completed. Setting it for voice and clarinet in dialogue rather than using the clarinet as part of the instrumental accompaniment, he demonstrated that the French style of romance dialoguée had arrived in Vienna. He wrote Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock) song for Anna Milder-Hauptmann (1785–1838), pupil of Salieri and one of the leading German sopranos. When she arrived in Vienna at the beginning of the century, she attracted the attention of Emanuel Schickaneder, the theatrical impresario (the librettist of Mozart’s The Magic Flute) who recommended her as a student to Salieri. It was she who first sang Beethoven’s Leonore, the heroine of his only opera Fidelio; a few years later, she became the prima donna assoluta of the Berlin Court Opera. Mendelssohn also used Milder-Hauptmann as a soloist in his historic revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. She admired Schubert’s songs greatly and repeatedly asked him to write her a brilliant showpiece, an extended work with contrasting sections. Almost a year after Schubert’s death, the composer’s brother sent her the music. She first sang the song in public in March 1830, in Riga, and included it frequently thereafter in her recitals. Schubert himself never heard it performed.

Milder may have assembled the text, which is the work of two writers. The first and last sections are from Der Berghirt (The Mountain Shepherd) by Wilhelm Müller, the author of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise. The central section is from Liebesgedanken (Thoughts of Love), by Helmina von Chézy, librettist of Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe and of Schubert’s Rosamunde.

The text illustrates the longing of a shepherd boy for his love and the appreciation of the arrival of spring. Schubert matched the agility of the clarinet line with the nimble soprano flexibility in this exquisite, brilliant, melodic trio. Overall, the song describes many feelings including sadness and loneliness. The first section is warm, the central section expresses grief and loneliness, and the third looks forward to spring with hope.

—Susan Halpern

© 2009 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation


NICO MUHLY (b. 1981) The Adulteress

I am addicted to the King James Bible; I have set biblical text many times, and this is the first time I have used the New Revised Standard Edition. My devotion to religious texts is historical, academic, esoteric, and ecstatic in the monastic, hide-yourself-in-a-cave sort of way. Jessica Rivera’s sense of these texts is immediate, jubilant, and radiantly, ecstatically modern. She feels the texts urgently; it was for this reason that I agreed to set them in this modern translation.

The basic structure for The Adulteress is two psalms sandwiching the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman, taken from the Gospel of John. The piece begins with Psalm 63 in a sort of modified plainchant, and after about two minutes, flashes suddenly to a more narrative, dry voice. Jesus’s interactions with the shamed woman and the angry mob who would stone her are presented in close-up narration, with a severe piano part. The voice occasionally stutters and reduces to syllabic pulsing. As the crowd disperses, Jesus speaks to the woman through a sequence of perfect fifths: little pairs of honest notes. After a slow syllabic pulse on the word “light,” the plainchant returns for a section of Psalm 56, ending with the lines, "You have delivered my soul from death, and my feet from falling, so that I may walk before God in the light of life."

The Adulteress is dedicated to Jessica Rivera, and was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for her debut recital this evening.

—Nico Muhly

Jessica Rivera, Soprano
Jessica Rivera is quickly establishing herself as one of the most creatively inspired vocal artists of her generation. She made her acclaimed Santa Fe Opera debut in the summer of 2005 as Nuria in the world premiere of the revised edition of Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. She reprised the role for the 2007 Grammy Award–winning Deutsche Grammophon recording with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Robert Spano, and in the Peter Sellars staging at Lincoln Center in January 2006, as well as in performances at the Barbican Center, and the Ojai and Ravinia festivals. The artist’s first performances of Margarita Xirgu in Ainadamar, a role created by Dawn Upshaw, occurred in the summer of 2007 at the Colorado Music Festival under the baton of Michael Christie.

Rivera joined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera in this season for its new production of Doctor Atomic under the direction of Alan Gilbert. Other 2008–2009 engagements include concert performances of Doctor Atomic with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, El Niño with David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, excerpts from Nixon in China with the Pittsburgh Symphony under the direction of John Adams, and A Flowering Tree with both the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She joins Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Fort Worth Symphony, as well as Michael Christie and the Phoenix Symphony, for Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, and appears as Micaëla in a concert performance of Carmen with Bramwell Tovey and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Rivera also tours Spain in performances of Osvaldo Golijov’s celebrated La Pasión según San Marcos with the Schola Cantorum de Caracas.

Rivera holds numerous titles of distinction, including finalist awards in Plácido Domingo’s 2004 Operalia World Opera Contest, the 2003 Metropolitan Opera National Council, 2002 Monte-Carlo Voice Masters Competition, 2002 Loren L. Zachary Competition, and Young Artist of the Year / First Place Winner by NATS (Los Angeles chapter). She received a Master of Music in Vocal Arts from the University of Souther California Thornton School of Music, and bachelors degree in music from Pepperdine University.

Maryanne Kim, Piano
Dr. Maryanne Kim, pianist and harpsichordist, is an active soloist and collaborative artist, and has performed throughout the US as well as in Canada, China, and South Korea. She regularly performed with Musica Angelica, a Los Angeles–based early music ensemble group, on the harpsichord and organ in various chamber music and orchestral concerts. Named Performer of the Year by the Beverly Hills Outlook, she premiered Ian Krouse’s song cycle Invocation with soprano Jessica Rivera in Los Angeles in August 2006.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Maryanne Kim received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California Los Angeles, graduating as valedictorian from the School of Arts and Architecture. She also received her Master of Arts degree from the University of Michigan in vocal accompanying and chamber music. In 2007 she received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in keyboard collaborative arts from the Thornton School of Music at University of Southern California, where she received the Koldofsky Scholarship and a teaching assistantship. Her principal teachers include Alan Smith, Martin Katz and Ick Choo Moon.

During the 2005–2006 academic year, Kim was a full-time lecturer at California State University of Bakersfield, and taught courses in theory, studio piano, accompanying, and chamber music, while taking an active part in the opera workshop as a coach-pianist. She has also worked as a coach, and has performed with Opera Idaho and as a staff pianist with San Francisco State University, Glendale City College, and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, among others. Kim currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, with her husband and son.

Todd Palmer, Clarinet
Having been involved in an array of creative and artistic presentations throughout his career, clarinetist Todd Palmer has appeared as soloist, collaborative artist, educator, and arranger in a variety of musical endeavors around the world. He has performed with the orchestras of Houston, Atlanta, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Montréal, and BBC Scotland, and with many of the world’s finest string ensembles, including the St. Lawrence, Brentano, Daedalus, Pacifica, and Ying quartets. In addition to Jessica Rivera, Palmer has performed with sopranos Kathleen Battle, Renée Fleming, and Dawn Upshaw. He also appeared in the world premiere of Ricky Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice with Elizabeth Futral at Lincoln Center in 2005. A recording of this work was released on Ghostlight Records and features the artists for whom the work was written.

Since winning the Young Concert Artist International Auditions, Palmer has appeared in 48 states, Asia, Europe, and South and Central America. Palmer also works closely with composer Osvaldo Golijov and is regarded as the champion of his klezmer clarinet quintet, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Palmer’s recording of this work with the St. Lawrence Quartet became a top-selling disc of 2002 and received two Grammy nominations, in addition to the Netherlands’ Classical Prelude Award. More recently, Palmer gave the world premiere of David Bruce’s Gumboots at Zankel Hall with the St. Lawrence Quartet.

He has been a participant for 14 years at Charleston South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival and for 10 years as a member of the touring group, Spoleto Chamber Music. He has also attended Ravinia, Caramoor, Bridgehampton, El Paso, Portland, Vancouver, and Marlboro Music festivals, and received the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship while a performer at Tanglewood. He has held principal positions in the Minnesota and Orpheus Chamber orchestras, the Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Grand Teton Festival. Currently, he is Principal in the Lincoln Center revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Many of Palmer’s arrangements have been performed throughout the country, including chamber versions of Debussy’s Première Rhapsodie, Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, and two suites from André Messager’s ballet, The Two Pigeons.

He can be heard on EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Koch, and Ghostlight Records.