CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Andrew Garland
Donna Loewy

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Andrew Garland, Baritone
Donna Loewy, Piano

DAVID CONTE Everyone Sang (NY Premiere)
STEPHEN PAULUS A Heartland Portrait (NY Premiere)
LORI LAITMAN Men With Small Heads (NY Premiere)
STEVEN MARK KOHN American Folk Set (NY Premiere)
LEE HOIBY "Last Letter Home" (NY Premiere)
TOM CIPULLO America 1968 (World Premiere)

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with the Marilyn Horne Foundation.

Program Notes:

DAVID CONTE (b. 1955)
Everyone Sang

The songs “Homecoming” and “Quilt” in Everyone Sang were commissioned in 2003 by the West Chester University Poetry Conference in West Chester, Pennsylvania, after the completion of the title song in 1998. “Entrance” was added in July 2003 for inclusion in this work.

The text of “Homecoming”—with its variation on Odysseus-and-Penelope themes of weaving and unraveling, long journeys and an eventual return home—is by A.E. Stallings, born in Georgia but now living in Greece. In poems such as this, she renews traditional rhyming verse and antique motifs. In the long, evocative piano introduction to the song, we seem to hear the waves over which Odysseus travels, interspersed elsewhere with shuttling figures as if being woven on a pianistic loom.

The second song, “Entrance,” is a setting of the poem “Eingang” by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by the American poet Dana Gioia. This poem—an exquisite summation of the poetic process—is the entrance to book 1, section 1 of Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images), written when Rilke was living in the north German artist colony Worpswede near Bremen. Each urgent address (“whoever you are,” “infinity is open,” “and you have made the world”) is ushered in with an upward-sweeping grand gesture in the piano, its recurrences unifying the song, while the mirrored figures near the end are the perfect musical analogy for poets who mirror the world they, and they alone, can see.
The third song, “Quilt,” sets a poem from Diane Thiel’s 2000 poetic anthology Echolocations. Beginning with an almost ritualistic hush of wide-spanning harmonies, this meditative song flares into passion only at the thought of bygone love.

The fourth song is the title song of the set, to a poem by the English poet Siegfried Sassoon who became famous for war poetry meant to convey the ugliness of the trenches to readers lulled by patriotic World War I propaganda. “Everyone Sang” is the last work in his anthology Picture-Show written at war’s end. This, Sassoon’s most famous poem, was often misunderstood to be about soldiers singing while on the march to battle, but it actually celebrates Armistice Day, as Conte’s rich, rhapsodic proclamation in song makes resoundingly evident.


STEPHEN PAULUS (b. 1949)
A Heartland Portrait

All five songs in A Heartland Portrait are settings of poems by Ted Kooser, one of America’s most distinguished poets. The cycle was commissioned by Linda and Jack Hoeschler for Thomas Hampson, who premiered it with the pianist Wolfram Rieger on January 17, 2006; “Porch Swing in September” was added shortly thereafter.

In the first song, “Flying at Night,” the poet situates us in a vast cosmos where far-off convulsions affect us in mysterious ways. Paulus brings starlight shimmer to life at the start of the song, including sparkles of light in the treble distance, and then for us to hear the “ripple effect” of a distant galaxy’s death gathering force in the piano (an electrifying passage).

“At Midnight” begins with menace and mystery as a dog barks in the night for no discernible reason; the only thing that is out and about is an old man’s rich, swashbuckling memories of many bygone loves.

“An August Night” tells of sultry, sweaty, perverse desire, with its oily voyeur lurking at a sleeping, naked young woman’s bedroom window as pianistic cicadas sing in the background. At the outset, the accompanist’s hands are far apart, but the left hand rises and the right hand descends until finally they meet and intertwine—directional symbolism for the workings of desire.

The humble spider who has strung her web between a porch post and the chain of a swing in “Porch Swing in September” decrees that the time for swinging is over. The season of moths and wasps seeking entry into the house is now upon us. Paulus allows us to swing in waltz time as long as possible while spinning a spider’s line of thread in sound.

The poet muses in “A Summer Night” how perfect, how simple the porch light seems to be as it is illuminated night after night, marking time along the passage from summer to winter, from an old woman’s bygone youth to her present post as keeper of the light. In Paulus’s alternation between bell-like dissonances and unalloyed harmonies, the conjunction of different time zones can be heard in a single song.


LORI LAITMAN (b. 1955)
Men with Small Heads

It was Lori Laitman’s daughter, Diana, who first introduced her to the work of Thomas Lux and his poetry inspired by observations of simple, unexpected things. The title song, “Men with Small Heads” (“and women with small heads,” as we learn in the next line), is reminiscent of a small child’s perspective, looking upward at adults to see their heads rendered disproportionately small by distance. Worried by the conundrum of normalcy for some and abnormality for others, the child with pinhead fears impels a visit to the doctor before learning that these were just normal American heads circa 1953.

“Refrigerator, 1957” tells of a never-opened jar of maraschino cherries invested with utmost glamour by someone brought up on bland food during the 1950s. For this fantasy unleashed by “sexual red” cherries, Laitman begins in the manner of a French chanteuse; the repeated glissando slide at the invocation of the text “bald meat, pocked peas” is scorn made hilarious—that is until the poignant final section where the persona meditates on the deeper meanings of something so exotic yet ecstatic.

A similar investiture of meaning applied to those ordinary objects overlooked by more prosy types is at work in “A Small Tin Parrot Pin” in which Lux rejoices in internal rhyme, alliteration, and varying uses of the same word (“my small tin parrot pin, bought from a bin … The actual pin, the pin that pins the pin”). Laitman makes the persona’s joy and playfulness definitively audible.

In “Snake Lake” Laitman turns the persona who warns people away from an all-too-inhabited lake into a snake himself—someone who hisses as he sings, using pungent dissonances that are snake-bites of sound. To cringe, laugh, and shudder all at once are the apropos mixed responses to this song.


STEVEN MARK KOHN (b. 1957)
American Folk Set

Of his American Folk Set, Steven Mark Kohn writes, “Folk songs are passed down through the generations … along the way, each party uses artistic license to embellish a song at their whim, thereby making it their own … My goal was to expand the storytelling power of these songs by creating accompaniments which had a more extended, even epic sweep, and thereby put them in a context where they could be performed in recital.”

The melody of the seafaring shanty, “Ten Thousand Miles Away,” originally came from Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag (1927). It tells the story of a man setting forth from England on a journey to find his blue-eyed, silver-tongued sweetheart, who is “a-doing of the grand in a far off land.” The sea-swells in the piano, its rhythms as changeable as ocean waves, are indeed epic in sweep. When the beloved is invoked, the key changes, and the song ends in a new key; to sing of her impels the first stage of the (musical) journey elsewhere.

The persona of “The Gallows Tree” is a man about to be hanged who bids the hangman “slack your rope” as first his mother, then his father, and finally his true love draw near. Folk tales, like Greek tragedy, tell mordant truths about family relationships; both parents want to see him hang, but his beloved saves him at song’s end. Kohn’s eerie figure is repeated in the piano when the persona thinks himself doomed—a true passage of music to make a chill run down the spine.

The final song of the cycle, “Hell in Texas,” credits the devil with the creation of Texas—a Hell of Satan’s own making. It is made all the more impishly emphatic by a composer whose wit is musical. It is surely not coincidental that the tritone interval F B-natural (“the devil in music,” according to musical teaching in the Middles Ages) precedes the final loud chord of the song.


LEE HOIBY (b. 1926)
Everyone Sang

“Last Letter Home” is the setting of a poignant final letter, meant to be opened only in the event of death, written on April 22, 2003, by 34-year-old Private First Class Jesse Givens of Springfield, Missouri, to his wife Melissa, his unborn son Carson (nicknamed “Bean”), and his six-year-old stepson Dakota (nicknamed “Toad”). Less than two weeks later, Givens’s tank crashed into the Euphrates River, and he drowned. This heartbreaking song begins, ends, and keeps circling back to ultimate clarity. Those who are moved by the chord progressions near the end, at the words “do me one favor” and “count them [the stars],” might recall that in 17th-century hymns by the likes of Giovanni Gabrieli, sacred things and people were similarly evoked with harmonies of this kind. The context, of course, was very different, but this testament of a loving husband and father is also something to hold sacred.


TOM CIPULLO (b. 1960)
America 1968

Tom Cipullo’s cycle America 1968 is based on poems by Robert Hayden, the first black poet to be chosen as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. Of this cycle, Cipullo wrote, “To think back on that year today is to be flooded with powerful images: two assassinations, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Apollo 8 orbiting the moon, the black power salute of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal-stand of the Mexico City Olympics … I found in Robert Hayden’s eloquent poetry a bridge to my memories of the time—and to my own ambivalence about the era.” As the composer continues, “Ultimately the vision is … encouraging, but the journey to that positive conclusion is harrowing—or at least I hope it is.”

In its solo version, “Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” contrasts the wretchedness of news from Selma and Saigon with the radiant dissolution of space and time into light in one of Claude Monet’s great series of paintings. For Monet, there is no horizon or sky, only immersion in “light that was not, was, forever is.” Cipullo turns that light into sound, first lyrical and swaying, then rapturous, and finally wistful almost beyond bearing.

By the second song, “Hey Nonny No,” harrowing begins in earnest. Here, the merry Shakespearean and Elizabethan madrigal refrain “hey nonny no” is in ironic conjunction with the pervasive, percussive strains evoking the anarchic spirit run and incursions of boogie-woogie and jazz motifs. The spoken and whispered injunction, “burn baby burn,” at the end is all the more chilling for being so hushed in the wake of great rage.

“The Point (Stonington, Connecticut)” again juxtaposes past and present, both the long-dead patriots of early New England celebrated by Cipullo with the softest of distant fanfares and the beauty of wild swans, terns, and beach-goers in the here and now.

“The Whipping” and “Those Winter Sundays” are products of Robert Hayden’s miserable childhood; born Asa Bundy Sheffey, he was taken in by a foster family whose chronic anger, both at each other and at him, left its mark. “The Whipping” is one of the most powerful songs, intricately structured with howls of fear, pain, anger, and, ultimately understanding. In Cipullo’s immense music, a thrumming drumbeat of repeated pitches is punctuated by savage chords, and the huge vault upwards at the words “[is whipping the] boy again” strikes home the fact of repeated beatings. Towards the end, the music grows softer and softer as fury retreats inward; the final chord of the piano and the last word of the singer’s part, “[to} bear,” come together in acid-etched anger of the sort that cannot be obliterated.

The sonnet “Those Winter Sundays”—one of Hayden’s most anthologized poems—is the acknowledgement in adulthood of the love his taciturn stepfather could not express openly; the fearful child Hayden once was did not have the means to thank the man who rose early, built the fires, made the house warm, and polished the child’s good shoes in “love’s austere and lonely offices.”

The last song is a vision of African American freedom as something to take for granted—real, alive, and as necessary as a heartbeat. Such freedom, says Hayden in an unrhymed sonnet with eloquent echoes of Horace’s Ode iii. 30 and Shakespeare’s sonnet 55, will be the ultimate tribute to the great abolitionist “Frederick Douglass” (1818–1895), born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, before escaping to become one of this country’s best public servants in fraught times. Douglass’s true legacy, Hayden writes in searing words, is not statues or even poetry, but an entire people living their lives in freedom, a word repeated in hushed reverence as the end of the song draws near.


—Susan Youens
Susan Youens is the J.W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame. She has written eight books on German song, the latest being Heinrich Heine and the Lied.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Andrew Garland, Baritone
Baritone Andrew Garland has sung the role of Dandini with the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Nevada Opera, and Dayton Opera; Rossini’s Figaro with Dayton Opera and the San Francisco Opera Center; Damis in Kirk Mechem’s Tartuffe at Lake George Opera; and Schaunard in La bohème with Fort Worth Opera, Dayton Opera, Lake George Opera and the Boston Lyric Opera. He stepped in at the last minute to sing from the pit for Nathan Gunn in Seattle Opera’s Florencia en el Amazonas. This season he returns to Fort Worth as Dandini and to his hometown’s Boston Lyric Opera for Les contes d’Hoffmann and Rusalka.

Concert highlights include performances of Carmina Burana, Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, and the solo works of Vaughan Williams and Mahler with organizations that include Ravinia, Atlanta Symphony, National Philharmonic, Dayton Philharmonic, Delaware Symphony, Tucson Symphony, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, University Musical Society (University of Michigan), Washington Master Chorale at the Kennedy Center, and the New York Festival of Song at Carnegie Hall.

Rapidly becoming known as an important recitalist, Mr. Garland, along with his collaborator, pianist Donna Loewy, creates programs of living American composers, working with today’s leading classical songwriters to present lively and inventive concerts across the continent often under the auspices of The Marilyn Horne Foundation. He has premiered works by Jake Heggie, Stephen Paulus, Lee Hoiby, Gabriela Lena Frank, Steven Mark Kohn, and Tom Cipullo.

Mr. Garland’s recordings include Puccini’s La bohème with the Atlanta Symphony (Telarc), a disc of Lee Hoiby songs accompanied by the composer (Naxos), and a compilation of folk song settings by Steven Mark Kohn (Azica). This past June, Mr. Garland took home second prize in the Jose Iturbi International Music Competition. He is also the winner of the Washington International, American Traditions, Lotte Lehmann, William C. Byrd, Opera Columbus, and NATS New England competitions.

Donna Loewy, Piano
Donna Hallen Loewy, Professor of Accompanying and Accompanist-in-Residence at the College–Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio, has prepared and accompanied many top prize winners of the National Federation of Music Clubs Artist Competition, NATS Artist Awards, D’Angelo Competition, and the Montreal Concours International de Musique. She is in demand as a collaborative pianist and master class teacher, performing frequently throughout the country.

Ms. Loewy is the official accompanist for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (Southern Ohio district), and has held similar positions with the International Clarinet Conference, Congress of Strings, International Double Reed Society, Yamaha Young Performing Artists, Tubamania in Australia, and the International Tuba and Euphonium Conference. She has worked as an opera coach with the Israel Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv; Opera Theatre and Music Festival of Lucca, Italy; International Institute of Vocal Arts in Chiari, Italy; and the Cincinnati and Dayton operas. Ms. Loewy has coached vocal chamber music for the Grandin Festival in Cincinnati and has been Chamber Music Coordinator for OTMFL in Lucca, Italy.

With tenor Daniel Weeks, Ms. Loewy was presented by The Marilyn Horne Foundation in recitals and residencies at the Kosciusko Foundation in New York; Cleveland Art Song Festival; Mozart Society of Carmel, California; and other venues throughout the US. In 2005, baritone Andrew Garland and Ms. Loewy presented their first concert of living American composers for The Marilyn Horne Foundation in New York, followed by performances at the Phillips Collection and Cosmos Club in Washington, DC; Art Song of Williamsburg; Fanfare in Louisiana; Huntsville Chamber Music Society; Meng Concert Hall in Fullerton, California; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and the Cerritos Center in California. Featured composers have included David Conte, Tom Cipullo, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jake Heggie, Lee Hoiby, Steven Mark Kohn, Lori Laitman, Thomas Pasatieri, Stephen Paulus, and Jeffrey Wood.

Ms. Loewy is the voice consultant and co-author of the Inner Game of Music Vocal Workbook (with Barry Green). She and Andrew Garland recently released a recording of folk song settings by Steven Mark Kohn, On the Other Shore, on the Azica label.