CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Kiri Te Kanawa
Warren Jones
with special guest Frederica von Stade

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 8:00 PM

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Soprano
Warren Jones, Piano
with special guest
Frederica von Stade, Mezzo-Soprano

MOZART Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls, K. 619
R. STRAUSS "Ständchen," Op. 17, No. 2
R. STRAUSS "Die Nacht," Op. 10, No. 3
R. STRAUSS "All’ mein Gedanken, mein Herz und mein Sinn," Op. 21, No. 1
R. STRAUSS "Morgen," Op. 27, No. 4
R. STRAUSS "Zueignung," Op. 10, No. 1
DUPARC "La vie antérieure"
DUPARC "Chanson triste"
DUPARC "Phidylé"
POULENC "Voyage à Paris" from Banalités, No. 4
POULENC "Hôtel" from Banalités, No. 2
POULENC "Les chemins de l'amour"
JAKE HEGGIE Final Monologue from Master Class
BRITTEN Evening from This Way to the Tomb
COPLAND "Why Do They Shut Me Out of Heaven?" from 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, No. 3
"Goodbye for Now"
PUCCINI "Sole e amore"
PUCCINI "Moirire?"
CILEA "Io son l’umile ancella" from Adriana Lecouvreur

Encores:
MOZART "Ah guarda sorella" from Così fan tutte
PORTER "True Love" from High Society
ROSSINI (attrib.) "Duetto buffo di due gatti"
PUCCINI "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

Austria, Germany, France, England, America, and Italy: we rove through six countries and more than 200 years of music on tonight’s program, in a display of this singer’s cosmopolitanism and breadth. One red thread that runs throughout, with two exceptions, is the notion of opera composers turning their hand to smaller genres, beginning with Mozart—who could, of course, write anything—and the Masonic solo cantata, Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt. Think “Richard Strauss” and you think “opera,” but his songs are beloved of singers and audiences alike, and we hear five favorites this evening. Henri Duparc is one of the exceptions to those of operatic repute: a mysterious disease robbed him early of the ability to compose, and therefore we have only 17 songs from his pen—but they are masterpieces. In 20th century France, Francis Poulenc also wrote marvelous songs, ranging from effervescent Parisian giddiness (he himself coined the pun “Leg-Poulenc,” or leg-pulling, for his antic exercises) to the most tender profundity. In his wake, we cross the Channel and traverse the Atlantic into the English-speaking world, beginning with the living American composer Jake Heggie’s homage (with the playwright Terrence McNally) to Maria Callas and proceeding to a song by Benjamin Britten and one song plucked from Aaron Copland’s great cycle of Emily Dickinson songs. Finally, we end in Italy, with two settings of Tuscan folk poetry by the half-German, half-Italian, and wholly Romantic composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari and two songs—not operatic arias—by Giacomo Puccini, whose name we do not ordinarily associate with song composition. From now on, we will.

Notes on the Program
By Susan Youens

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls, K. 619
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

Mozart possibly began writing his solo cantata, Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt (Those who honor the creator of the immeasurable universe), K. 619, in 1783, but he did not complete it until July 1791, five months before his premature death on December 5th. He was a happy man that last summer of his life: he had begun work on Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), and his and Constanze’s sixth child was also born in July. Like the famous opera, the cantata is born of Mozart’s membership in the Freemasons, a secret society condemned by some papal authorities for its divergence from religious doctrine. Mozart was admitted on December 14, 1784, to the Viennese lodge “Zur Wohltätigkeit” (Beneficence), and his adherence to their philosophical ideals is on display in many of his last works: the reverence for a Creator who is called by many names, the injunctions to moderation and unity, the condemnation of sectarian thinking, and the elevation of friendship and brotherhood as the guiding lights for a new age of peace. The poet Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen, who was a disciple of the great late 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, issues a call to all who read or hear these words to live by these generous principles: what tragic irony that the Terror would soon be unleashed on France, and that Europe would not see peace for almost a quarter-century thereafter. Mozart’s introduction tells us before a word is sung that serious matters are at issue, with chords sweeping downwards in ceremonial dotted rhythms. The singer commands that we “Hear! Hear!” (“Hört … hört”) and does so in dramatic manner, the urgent imperatives then followed by a graceful air about brotherly love and unity. The injunctions to stop the madness of war—how sad that the plea is once again of the moment—is a whirlwind of late Mozartian complexity before clarity and calm reassert their presence. “Just be wise, full of strength, and fraternal … then life’s true happiness will be attained,” the singer proclaims at the close. No wonder we hear echoes of Die Zauberflöte in this music.

RICHARD STRAUSS “Ständchen,” Op. 17, No. 2; “Die Nacht,” Op. 10, No. 3; “All’ mein Gedanken, mein Herz und mein Sinn,” Op. 21, No. 1; “Morgen,” Op. 27, No. 4; “Zueignung,” Op. 10, No. 1
Born June 11, 1864, in Munich; died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria.

“Actually, I like my songs best,” Richard Strauss once said to the great singer Hans Hotter, a statement that should perhaps have been accompanied by a pinch or two of salt, given his dedication to opera. But it is true that within the concentrated brevity of song forms, he could experiment with musical ideas to be transferred later to the broader canvas of opera, and he knew that many of his songs are artistic gems. He had a lifelong love affair with the soprano voice: his wife, the redoubtable Pauline de Ahna, was a soprano for whom he composed “Morgen” and the other songs of Op. 27 as a wedding gift in 1894. Unlike contemporaries such as Hugo Wolf, Strauss tended to seek his song texts in the works of living authors, including Adolf Friedrich von Schack, the poet of the immortal “Ständchen,” Op. 17, No. 2. Schack belonged to the “Munich Poetic Circle”—Brahms also availed himself of their poems for his songs—that met formally in an academy sponsored by the Bavarian king and informally as “The Crocodile Club,” their poetry grounded in the belief that reality is ugly and that beauty is the only effective antidote for life’s grimness. This serenade is a lover’s plea to his beloved to steal softly from her house by night and meet him under the linden tree that is the chosen spot for poetic rendez-vous both licit and illicit since the Middle Ages. Have anticipatory lover’s rapture and the heart’s leaps of joy ever been more beautifully set to music than here? The songs of Op. 10 were composed when Strauss was working as assistant conductor of the ducal court orchestra in Meiningen; at the time, he was in love with a married woman, Dora Wihan, the wife of a cellist who was a colleague of his father’s. If one reads the Austrian civil servant and amateur poet Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg’s text for “Die Nacht,” one might expect a more shivery, menace-filled song about night as a thief of all beauty, but Strauss in October and November of 1885 mutes the fear and brings to sounding life a lover’s nocturnal ecstasy. Felix Dahn, the poet of “All mein Gedanken,” was famous in his own day for historical novels about ancient Germany’s Ostrogoth empire in Italy, but he wrote poetry as well. Strauss’s setting of a poem in which a lover sends his thoughts flying to find the sweetheart’s window and bring her his greetings belongs to the earlier 19th-century tradition of the Lied im Volkston, or the folksong-like art-song. Among the delightful details is the way the singer near the beginning lingers momentarily on the word “Liebste” (sweetheart) and then has to catch up with a piano that has already moved on. One also notes the melodic flourish that embellishes the verb of greeting, “grüssen,” at the end: this is no ordinary greeting, after all, but a lover’s/musician’s tender rapture. John Henry Mackay, the poet of three of the four Op. 27 gems, including “Morgen,” was brought to Germany as an infant and remained there the rest of his life; his left-wing, even anarchistic leanings endeared him to the young Strauss, who was also a rebel against conventional opinions. But for his wedding gift, the composer chose not political verse but Mackay’s blissful vision of union on the “sun-breathing earth,” beginning with the piano’s wordless song of love too deep for impassioned motion or shouts of ecstasy. The touch of reverential darkness at the end, as the silence of love’s communion enfolds singer and listener alike, is heart-stopping in its truth and beauty. And finally, we hear “Zueignung,” another early song to a poem by Gilm, whose persona invokes, first, the sufferings of love, then the “freedom” of the single state, and finally the bliss of reciprocated love, each stanza concluding with the same words of thanks. Now paeans of ecstasy are appropriate and on display.

HENRI DUPARC “La vie antérieure,” “Chanson triste,” “Phidylé”
Born January 21, 1848, in Paris; died February 12, 1933, in Mon-de-Marsan.

The long-lived Henri Duparc composed only seventeen mélodies (the designation for later 19th-century French song) before falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenic disease that prevented him from composing at all in the final 48 years of his life. As if in compensation for such a hideous fate, his songs are among the greatest in the French language, their subtlety and gravitas beyond the reach of most of his contemporaries. Under the aegis of the German composers he most revered (Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Beethoven, and Bach), he fashioned songs that are inimitably French. Charles Baudelaire is one of France’s greatest poets, and Duparc—one of the first composers to champion his verse—created two of the finest Baudelaire songs of them all (“L’invitation au voyage” is the other). The sonnet “La vie antérieure” from the great anthology Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) is the poet’s attempt to escape from the horrors of modern life to an imaginary island, poetic, exotic, majestic. But the poem ends with the darkness of unnamed grief; if this is the secret sorrow Romantics loved to cherish, it is also an admission of the inability to keep Time and the world at bay by such aesthetic means. In this, his last song, Duparc tracks every twist-and-turn in a profound poem, from the repeated columns of music at the beginning to match the colonnades, the quasi-Wagnerian surging sea, the proclamatory announcement, “C’est là que j’ai vécu” (It is there that I once lived), the gorgeous harmonic shifts for the exotic splendors and nude slaves, the somber chanting for the sorrowful languor, and the “dying away” postlude. Farewells to music seldom come more gorgeous than this. In Henri Cazalis’s poem “Chanson triste,” a lover seeks healing for his sadness in the beloved’s eyes, arms, and kisses, and Duparc floats the limpid plea on harp-like waves of exquisite harmonies. In his wounded melancholy, the persona is not sure that even this love can cure him, and the composer emphasizes the doubt at song’s end by a beautifully telling small break or breath after the word “peut-être” (perhaps). The half-Creole, half-French poet Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle founded the Parnassian school of poetry in order to extol chiseled formal structures and objectivity in reaction to Romanticism’s heated passions. Duparc plucked the text for “Phydilé” from the poet’s Études latines (Latin Studies) and made of it a study in musical ravishment. When the singer bids his beloved to “Repose” (Rest) three times in succession, we are, in Graham Johnson’s words, “putty in Duparc’s hands.”

FRANCIS POULENC “Voyage à Paris,” from Banalités, No. 4; “Hôtel,” from Banalités, No. 2; “Les chemins de l’amour”
Born January 7, 1899, in Paris; died there January 30, 1963.

Francis Poulenc saw Guillaume Apollinaire (the half-Italian/Swiss, half-Italian/Polish illegitimate son of Angelica Alexandrine Kostrowitsky and Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont) for the first time in late 1916, although he was already embroiled in the great avant-garde poet’s verse several years earlier. In 1950, the composer told an interviewer, “I find myself able to compose music only to poetry with which I feel total contact—a contact transcending mere admiration. This quality is one I felt for the first time when I encountered the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire. That was in 1912, when I was 13.” The poet died in the great flu pandemic of 1918 when Poulenc was still a teenager, but his importance in Poulenc’s life can hardly be over-stated: by 1954, he had composed 34 songs to Apollinaire’s poetry. All three of the works on tonight’s program are war-time compositions, composed in 1940 shortly after the soldier Poulenc was demobilized as the result of the disgraceful treaty between France’s head of state, Philippe Pétain, and Hitler. The first two come from a set of five songs collectively entitled Banalités (Banalities), all on texts by “my first poet.” “Voyage à Paris” captures in a nutshell Poulenc’s undiluted joy upon returning to the city he loved most; “for me,” he wrote, “Paris often brings tears to my eyes and music to my ears.” Tonight, that delicious, giddy waltz-song is followed by the distillation of languorous torpor in “Hôtel.” Anyone who has ever found himself or herself alone in a hotel room and wanted, not to do whatever work has brought one there but only to lie there in a state of utter laziness while smoking one of France’s pungent cigarettes (or drinking a glass of wine or beer or whatever other sensuous escape is at hand), will recognize the human condition in this song, but with a French flavor. That same month, Poulenc also wrote “Les chemins de l’amour” for the great chanteuse Yvonne Printemps, its text a snippet from Jean Anouilh’s drama Léocadia, premiered on November 3. Another waltz-song about the ways of love, it is the deliciously frothy dessert at the end of this group.

JAKE HEGGIE Final Monologue from Master Class
Born March 31, 1961, in West Palm Beach, Flordia.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN “Evening,” from This Way to the Tomb
Born November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft; died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh.
AARON COPLAND “Why do they shut me out of Heaven?” from 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, No. 3
Born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York; died December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York.

Jake Heggie, in addition to his acclaimed operas Dead Man Walking and The End of the Affair, has composed some 200 songs, including the “Final Monologue” from Terrence McNally’s Tony award-winning play Master Class, a fictive homage to Maria Callas. This extended song was originally composed for the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Merola Opera Program in San Francisco, but Heggie has revised it in a higher key especially for Kiri Te Kanawa. This monologue is nothing less than a singer’s Credo, a great artist’s “ave atque vale.” In this summation at the end of a music-making life, she sings to us of what matters most in this great endeavor—that the world should be enriched—and counsels the next generation of singers to “sing honestly,” to draw their music from the deepest wellsprings of feeling.

The great 20th-century composer Benjamin Britten’s “Evening” is the first of three songs for his friend Ronald Duncan’s masque and anti-masque, This Way to the Tomb (the writer reincarnates the antique theatrical tradition by which a serious piece of mummery—the masque—was followed by a comic-ironic reversal known as the anti-masque), its subject the temptation of Saint Anthony. In 1944, Britten was immersed in work on his great opera Peter Grimes and was therefore a bit reluctant to accede to Duncan’s request: “What a one you are! Here I am up to my eyes in opera and spiritual crises and you expect me to drop everything and write you two songs.” Happily for us, he complied. Here, evening begins with an act of cosmic murder, with the fox-sun slashing evening’s throat. That there is majesty in this violent ceremony is evident in the ritualistically repeated vocal phrases and in every one of the sweeping chords in the piano (or harp) throughout the song.

Copland, says his biographer Howard Pollack, “seemed born to set Dickinson,” and his Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, composed in 1950, are perhaps his most important work for voice and piano. At her death in 1886, the reclusive poet left an astonishing total of 1,775 poems, mostly written on sheets of letter paper stitched in fascicles of five or six leaves but some on brown paper bags, invitations, drugstore flyers, a chocolate wrapper, and bills. Her poems are miniature containers for immensity—with life, death, Nature as both a benign and a destructive force, faith, despair, and immortality her principal preoccupations. “Behind Me — dips Eternity — / Before Me — Immortality — / Myself — the Term between —,” she wrote; her dashes and idiosyncratic punctuation puzzled many an early editor and were largely smoothed over in the corrupt editions Copland used. Those who hear “Why do they shut me out of Heaven?” soon realize that Dickinson did not believe in the Christian God of her father and family but in the “God” of poetic immortality. Her “too loud singing” is the emblem of her nonconformity, and she imagines herself shut out of orthodoxy’s heaven for it. There is defiance in Copland’s setting of the initial questions, “Why do they shut me out of Heaven? Did I sing too loud?”, with its proclamatory leap to a high note at the word “loud;” the pitch is raised even higher when the same questions return at the end. But sandwiched between such stubborn resistance is tenderness and pleading, lest the greatest of doors be closed in her spiritual face.

ERMANNO WOLF-FERRARI “Quando ti vidi a quel canto apparire,” Op. 12, No. 1;“E tanto c’è pericol ch’io ti lasci,” Op. 11, No. 3
Born January 12, 1876, in Venice; died there January 21, 1948.
GIACOMO PUCCINI “Sole e amore,” “Morire?”
Born December 22, 1858, in Lucca, Italy; died November 29, 1924, in Brussels.

“Why do some innovators find fault with the whole of the past? Can you imagine a saint who would find fault with all the saints who came before him?” Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari once said when particularly annoyed by the insistence on musical “progress” in his day, whether defined as Schoenberg-Berg-Webern, Stravinsky, or the French modernists. The son of a German father (the “Wolf” in his name) and an Italian mother (this is where “Ferrari” comes from), he suffered in the 20th century’s two world wars, with his “fatherland” and “motherland” on opposite sides of mustard gas onslaughts and Panzer battalions. His pre-World War I operas were “hits,” but the world moved on and, so he felt, left him behind in the wake of the first pan-European cataclysm. His Opp. 11 and 12 rispetti (settings of an antique Tuscan poetic form consisting of a six- or eight-line stanza in hendecasyllabic, or eleven-syllable, lines) come from 1902, before the operas, before the wars, and they are delicately, richly lyrical songs. Rispetti often present a lover’s compliment several times over, the words of love gathering emphasis as they are varied, and “Quando ti vidi a quel canto apparire” is the tiny, tender account of a coup de foudre, or love at first sight. Struck dumb by adoration, the persona only finds words and melody as their love affair begins; the flowering into rhapsodic melisma at the word “sole” (sun) tells us that the beloved is the source of life and light. The third song in Op. 11, “E tanto c’è pericol ch’io ti lasci,” is a repeated assurance of continued fidelity: “If a jasmine blooms in the middle of a garden in mid-ocean, our love will end [but not until then],” the beloved is told. No one hearing music of such beauty could doubt it.

When a composer is as massively identified with opera as was Giacomo Puccini, his works in other genres often languish in obscurity. But Puccini’s songs are attractive creations, well worth reviving. “Sole e amore” was first published in a musical supplement to the art magazine Paganini and ends with the amusing dedication, “To the Paganini G. Puccini.” As he was composing La Bohème, Puccini recalled this earlier song as the basis for the famous quartet, “Addio dolce svegliare alla mattina!” (Goodbye, sweet wakening in the morning!) at the end of Act 3; “Sole e amore” was, the composer later said, “questo germe primo di Bohème” (the first embryonic beginning of Bohème). “Morire?” was composed on behalf of the Italian Red Cross to benefit the families of fallen soldiers and was then subsequently reworked in the Viennese version of Puccini’s opera La rondine (The Swallow) in 1920. This richly melancholy meditation on the meaning of life—when we are on death’s shores, we will know—by the librettist of La rondine, Il tabarro, and Turandot could not be more apt for Puccini’s unique musical language.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens’s writings on lieder include Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin and Schubert’s
Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, both published by Cambridge University Press.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Soprano
Born in New Zealand, Kiri Te Kanawa gained legendary status almost overnight after her sensational debut as the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1971. From then, she moved rapidly into the front rank of international opera and has become one of the most famous sopranos in the world.

In the genre of opera, Kiri Te Kanawa is a familiar figure in the leading opera houses of the world, including Covent Garden, the Metropolitan, the Chicago Lyric Opera, Paris Opera, Sydney Opera House, the Vienna State Opera, La Scala, and San Francisco Opera. Her lyric soprano heroines include the three major leading roles by Richard Strauss (Arabella, the Marschallin, and the Countess in Capriccio); Mozart’s Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira, Pamina, and the Countess Almaviva; Verdi’s Violetta and Desdemona; and Puccini’s Tosca and Mimi.

On the concert stage, her natural serenity and vocal beauty have joined with such major orchestral ensembles as the Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony, and the Boston Symphony under the baton of such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, and Sir Georg Solti.

Kiri has released a number of distinguished recordings, including the complete Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosí fan Tutte, Die Zauberflöte, Tosca, La Rondine, Manon Lescaut, Simon Boccanegra, Arabella, Otello, La Traviata, Der Rosenkavalier, Faust, Eugene Onegin, Carmen, Capriccio, and La Bohème.

Outside the operatic field, her extensive recordings include the Strauss Four Last Songs; the notably successful Songs of the Auvergne; Berlioz’s Nuits d’été; Brahms’ A German Requiem; Handel’s Messiah; and Beethoven’s Ninth and Mahler’s Fourth symphonies. She joined Nelson Riddle for Blue Skies, an album of American popular songs, followed by albums of Gershwin, Porter, and Kern songs and three classics of the light music stage: My Fair Lady, South Pacific, and West Side Story.

A Dame Commander of the British Empire, Kiri Te Kanawa has been conferred with honorary degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Dundee, Durham, Nottingham, Sunderland, Warwick, Auckland, Waikato, and Chicago. She is also an honorary fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Kiri is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music.

June 2002 saw Dame Kiri performing at Buckingham Palace, in celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee. A Gala Concert was given in February 2004, in Auckland, to launch The Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, a charity which aims to give support and financial aid to dedicated New Zealand singers and musicians.

In March 2006, Dame Kiri sang a tribute to the Queen at the Opening Ceremony of the 18th Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and in October 2006, released an exciting new album (EMI label) in collaboration with composer Karl Jenkins, entitled Kiri Sings Karl. In April 2007, she was honoured by the Metropolitan Opera Guild at their 72nd annual tribute luncheon. Dame Kiri continues to perform in concert halls and arenas throughout the world, with performances for 2007 in New Zealand, Japan, Korea, England, Brazil, Turkey, Jersey, the US, Canada, Hungary, Spain, Hong Kong, and China.

Warren Jones, Piano
Warren Jones frequently performs with many of today’s best-known artists, including Barbara Bonney, Ruth Ann Swenson, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Denyce Graves, Stephanie
Blythe, Håkan Hagegård, Bo Skovhus, Samuel Ramey, James Morris, John Relyea, and Joseph Alessi. In the past he has partnered such great singers as Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, Carol Vaness, Judith Blegen, Tatiana Troyanos, and Martti Talvela.

Mr. Jones has been featured in an interview with Eugenia Zuckerman on CBS Sunday Morning in which his work as a performer and teacher was explored, and he has appeared on television across the United States with Luciano Pavarotti. He has often been a guest artist at Carnegie Hall and in Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series, as well as the festivals of Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Caramoor. His international engagements have included recitals at the Salzburg Festival, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, the Maggio Musicale Festival in Florence, the Teatro Fenice in Venice, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and Opéra Bastille, Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Cultural Centre in Hong Kong, and theaters throughout Scandinavia and Korea. Mr. Jones has been invited three times to the White House by American presidents to perform at concerts honoring the President of Russia, and Prime Ministers of Italy and Canada—and three times he has appeared at the U.S. Supreme Court as a specially invited performer for the Justices and their guests. As a guest at the Library of Congress, Mr. Jones has appeared with the Juilliard Quartet in performances of the Schumann Piano Quintet. He was featured in the United Nations memorial concert and tribute to Miss Audrey Hepburn, an event which was telecast worldwide following Miss Hepburn’s death.

Mr. Jones has been featured on many recordings, including with Håkan Hagegård in songs of Brahms, Sibelius, and Stenhammar for BMG / RCA Red Seal; on a recital disc of spirituals with Denyce Graves titled Angels Watching Over Me; I Carry Your Heart with Ruth Ann Swenson for EMI; Every Time We Say Goodbye with Samuel Ramey for Sony Classical; and Fauré Songs with Barbara Bonney and Håkan Hagegård for RCA Red Seal. Mr. Jones’s recording of Copland and Ives songs with Mr. Ramey for Decca/Argo was nominated for a Grammy Award, and he can also be seen on the best-selling Deutsche Grammophon video/laser disc of his memorable Metropolitan Museum of Art concert with Kathleen Battle.

Mr. Jones is a member of the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, and also teaches and performs at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. He was Assistant Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera for ten years and for three seasons at San Francisco Opera.

Born in Washington, DC, Mr. Jones grew up in North Carolina and graduated with honors from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he was recently honored with the Conservatory’s Outstanding Alumni Award.

with special guest
Frederica von Stade, Mezzo-Soprano
Frederica von Stade’s career has taken her to the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. She made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in 1970 and has sung nearly all of her great roles with that company. In January 2000, the Metropolitan Opera celebrated the 30th anniversary of her debut with a new production specifically for her, The Merry Widow. In addition, Miss von Stade has appeared with every leading American opera company, including San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Los Angeles Opera. Her career in Europe has been no less spectacular, with new productions mounted for her at Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, and the Paris Opera. She is invited regularly by the finest conductors, among them Claudio Abbado, Charles Dutoit, James Levine, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, Leonard Slatkin, and Michael Tilson Thomas, to appear in concert with the world’s leading orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, Washington’s National Symphony, and the Orchestra of La Scala.
With impressive versatility, she has effortlessly traversed an ever-broadening spectrum of musical styles and dramatic characterizations. A noted bel canto specialist, she excelled as the heroines of Rossini’s La cenerentola and Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Bellini’s La sonnambula. She is an unmatched stylist in the French repertoire; her elegant figure and keen imagination have made her the world’s favorite interpreter of the great trouser roles; her artistry has inspired the revival of neglected works such as Massenet’s Cherubin, Thomas’ Mignon, Rameau’s Dardanus, and Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria; and her ability as a singing actress has allowed her to portray wonderful works in operetta and musical theater.
Frederica von Stade’s orchestral and recital repertoire is equally broad, embracing works from the Baroque to those of today’s composers. She has made over 70 recordings with every major label, including complete operas, aria albums, symphonic works, solo recital programs, and popular crossover albums. Her recordings have garnered six Grammy nominations, two Grand Prix du Disc awards, the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, Italy’s Premio della Critica Discografica, and “Best of the Year” citations by Stereo Review and Opera News. Miss von Stade appears regularly on television, through numerous PBS and other broadcasts.
Frederica von Stade is the holder of honorary doctorates from Yale University, Boston University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Georgetown University School of Medicine, and her alma mater, the Mannes School of Music. In 1998, Miss von Stade was awarded France’s highest honor in the Arts when she was appointed as an officer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 1983 she was honored with an award given at The White House by President Reagan in recognition of her significant contribution to the arts.