CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Song Continues... Annual Recital

Zankel Hall
Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

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Nicole Heaston, Soprano
Meagan Miller, Soprano
Stephanie Blythe, Mezzo-Soprano
Guang Yang, Mezzo-Soprano
Garrett Sorenson, Tenor
Rod Gilfry, Baritone
Evan Hughes, Bass-Baritone
Margo Garrett, Piano
Warren Jones, Piano
Tamara Sanikidze, Piano
Brian Zeger, Piano

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s emergence as a major song composer came with the composition of two songbooks at the same time: The House of Life (words by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and The Songs of Travel. The latter—a late specimen of the wanderers who populate the Romantic song cycle from Schubert onward—had a complicated genesis, beginning with one song (“Whither Must I Wander”) in 1901, continuing with still more songs in 1904, and culminating with “I Have Trod the Upward and Downward Slope,” discovered after Vaughan Williams’s death. “Let Beauty Awake” is the second song in the cycle and one of the loveliest, its vaulting vocal arcs expressive of the wing-span of ardent love, its waves of arpeggiated and rustling passion in the piano the perfect accompaniment for this minstrel of love and nature.

Charles Griffes was born in Elmira, New York, but studied composition in Germany with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck (not surprisingly, Griffes’s first songs were in German). Until his premature death, he lived quietly and taught at a music school in Tarrytown, New York; given the refinement and originality of his music and its evolution over his brief creative span of years, it is sad to think of what he might have composed, had he been granted a longer life. The three songs of the Scottish-Celtic writer Fiona McLeod (the pseudonym of William Sharp, in a reversal of the usual script whereby women masquerade as male authors) stand at a peak of Griffes’s songwriting skills; like many of Mahler’s songs, they exist both for orchestra and voice and with piano accompaniment. “The Lament of Ian the Proud” is surely one of the most plangent laments ever composed, its protagonist old, blind, and inconsolably grief-stricken for she who “will return no more.” A wordless lament over a drone bass sounds in the piano before the singer asks, “What is this crying that I hear in the wind?” Is it the old grief or something new? The intertwining of the right-hand melody and the vocal line at times in this song is a matter for marvel, and so too are the short-lived outbreaks of passionate grief, returning each time to bleak sorrow, all the more melancholy for its restraint.

Henri Duparc composed only 17 songs before falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenic disease that silenced him for the remaining 48 years of his life; as if in compensation for such a hideous fate, his songs are among the greatest in the French language. From the Parnassian poet Marie-René Leconte de Lisle’s Études latines (“Latin Studies”), Duparc plucked “Phydilé” for one of his last and loveliest songs, in which ravishment proceeds apace. By the time the musical persona has bid his beloved “Repose” (Rest) three times in succession, the listener too is lulled into the most sensuous and idyllic of musical dream-states.

We do not generally think of Giuseppe Verdi, the genius who created so many marvelous operas and an unforgettable Requiem, as a song composer, but in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he wrote two sets of “romances,” or songs. At the time, Verdi was a frequent visitor at the elegant Milanese home of Clarina Maffei, the wife of the poet Andrea Maffei, a salon where music, literature, and anti-Austrian sentiment prevailed; one can imagine these songs performed in the stylish and learned company to be found there. “Deh, pietoso, oh Addolorata” is a setting of Luigi Balestri’s Italian translation of Gretchen’s prayer to the Mater Dolorosa in Goethe’s Faust, Part I (“Ach neige, du Schmerzenreiche” is the German text), a foreshadowing of the preghieras, or prayer arias, to follow in the composer’s operatic future. Here, the forlorn Gretchen, pregnant with Faust’s child, begs the Virgin to take pity on her, and Verdi accordingly traverses an array of mournful, passionate, and agitated emotions in this song, ending by withdrawal into quiet grief.

In the early 1880s, Debussy was introduced to a higher social milieu at the home of the Paris architect Pierre Vasnier and his wife Marie-Blanche. Madame Vasnier was an excellent singer, with what was evidently a considerable top range, and Debussy, more than a little in love with her, tailored several songs to her talents, including “Apparition,” composed at Ville d’Avray on February 8, 1884, and dedicated to his muse. The poem by the great French poet Stéphane Mallarmé was brand-new at the time; it first appeared in November 1883 in the periodical Lutèce. One can see why its imagery would appeal to a young composer in Debussy’s circumstances, with its melancholy moon, misty flowers, daydreams, dying viols, and the sight of the beloved recalling childhood fairy visions. This is a song on the cusp between the lush French salon-song conventions Debussy inherited and the mélodie as he would remake it, here with prophesies of his later manner and a Wagnerian touch here and there.

Hugo Wolf defiantly placed his 10 settings of inset-poems from Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship”), at the beginning of his anthology of 51 Goethe songs, composed in 1888–89 and published in 1890. He knew that the musical cognoscenti would be very familiar indeed with Beethoven’s, Schubert’s, and Schumann’s settings of these same famous poems (in company with a host of other composers), and he thereby asserts his pride in his own post-Wagnerian endeavor. The two most haunting characters in Goethe’s novel are the enigmatic Harper (whose true name, Augustin Cipriani, we only learn at the end, after his suicide) and the mysterious waif Mignon; once again, we only discover at the close that she is the daughter by incest of the Harper and his sister Sperata. Brought up separately, the lovers do not discover their close kinship until after they have created a child, with madness (his) and death (hers) attendant on the disastrous news. The quasi-androgynous Mignon, whom Goethe describes as a “Knabenmädchen” or “boy-girl,” was kidnapped by a troupe of traveling acrobats and subsequently rescued by Wilhelm. She symbolizes humanity’s two natures, earthly and spiritual, male and female, and her life is governed by “Sehnsucht” or “longing,” a form of Romantic desire that manifests itself as affliction; in songs such as “Kennst du das Land,” she reaches out for the lost and irretrievable ideal. Goethe tells us at the beginning of Book 3 that she sings with “a certain solemn grandeur, as if … she were imparting something of importance,” and Wolf imbues his setting with all the passionate intensity of the musical world post-Bayreuth.

Libby Larsen, one of American’s most performed living composers, has composed an impressive body of vibrant music for voice, including the song cycle Try Me, Good King, premiered by Meagan Miller and Brian Zeger on January 19, 2001, for the Marilyn Horne Foundation’s eighth annual recital. “Divorce, behead, die, divorce, behead, die,” was the grade-school memory game by which Ms. Larsen first came to know the fate of Henry VIII’s six wives. Five of them appear here, minus Katherine Parr, the sixth and last wife, who outlived the tumultuous monarch she married. The first song, “Try Me, Good King,” tells of the Castilian-born first wife and queen consort, Katherine of Aragon; after all of their male heirs died in childhood, Henry attempted to have their marriage annulled, and the resulting quarrel with the Papacy led to England’s break with Roman Catholicism. “My tribulations are so great,” she wrote in 1531, little more than a year before Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, “my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the king’s wicked intention … that it is enough to shorten 10 lives, much more mine.” This song is a setting of a letter she wrote in late December 1535, when she sensed that death was near (she died on January 7, 1536), and Ms. Larsen has interwoven references to John Dowland’s immortal lute song “In Darkness Let Me Dwell” into the fabric of her latter-day creation. The tolling ostinato in the left hand, the “plucked” octaves in the right hand, the death-bell plunging down to the piano’s depths, and the sweeping melismas that emphasize “many” [calamities and troubles] are among the jeweled details of this remarkable song.

Ricky Ian Gordon, born in Oceanside, New York, composes and writes lyrics for the American musical theater and the operatic stage, including his most recent opera The Grapes of Wrath (2007); My Life with Albertine, based on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He is centrally concerned with the American art song and has composed four songbooks, the song cycles Orpheus and Euridice, Late Afternoon, Green Sneakers, and more. In “Afternoon on a Hill,” he sets Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetic definition of a happy day, a prescription for how to guarantee gladness: to linger in the midst of Nature, revel in its beauties without despoiling or destroying any of them, and then leave for the lights of home. A brisk pulse of happy energy runs throughout the song, with “Chopsticks”-like repeated figures (and who isn’t happy when playing Chopsticks on the piano?) and the occasional leap of joy in the right-hand part. The singer’s melismas on the exhalation “Ah!” at the end are rapture made audible.

Tchaikovsky was very fond of the writings of Aleksey Tolstoy, cousin to the great creator of War and Peace; eleven of his romances (the Russian term for a variety of elegant salon song) are settings of poems by this man. The text of “Don Juan’s Serenade” comes from Tolstoy’s 1860 dramatic poem, “Don Juan”—this is, of course, another manifestation of the archetypal compulsive male seducer, invented by Gabriel Tellez (better known as Tirso de Molina) in the early 17th century—and is sung as a joke under the prostitute Nisetta’s balcony. Having rashly promised the Commendatore that he will marry Donna Anna, Don Juan hopes that insolence on a scale this colossal will prove him ineligible as a son-in-law. Whatever his purposes, this is musical seduction by someone very well practiced in the art; Tchaikovsky loved Mozart’s Don Giovanni above all other works and knew how to exercise the utmost in feigned charm and unfeigned high spirits in his own manner.

The rousing spiritual, “Plenty Good Room,” brings together lilting, jazzy rhythms, a “walking bass,” and a jaunty but minor-mode inflected melody to assure us that there is room in Heaven for us all. What makes this song so moving, for all its verve and energy, is the frank admission of fear lest he or she be called to the Lord without being ready for death; to counter such fear, the singer repeats over and over that when we arrive in the kingdom of God, we can choose our seat and sit down anywhere we please. After an invitation as gloriously emphatic as the end of this spiritual, who wouldn’t heed the directive?

“Spring Waters” is the first of Rachmaninoff’s five songs on texts by the diplomat-poet Fedor Tyutchev, one of Russia’s greatest Nature poets and friend to the German Romantic Friedrich Schelling, whose Idealist philosophy he absorbed. This song is the Russian equivalent of Eduard Mörike’s and Hugo Wolf’s rapturous “Er ist’s!” to tell of spring’s advent after a long, hard winter; because this is Russia, ice still reigns, but the rising, rambunctious waters of the piano will, we feel sure, banish the last remnants of winter in short order.

Salvatore Cardillo’s Neapolitan classic “Core ‘ngrato” was composed in 1911 for none other than Enrico Caruso and has remained a staple of the Italian tenor concert repertoire ever since; those who saw the third-season finale of The Sopranos will remember Dominic Chianese’s rendition of this song. Here, a woman named Catarina (“Catari”) is thoroughly scolded for her hardness of heart to a melody of irresistible charm; Cardillo did compose other works, but this is his “one-hit wonder.” The piano introduction gives us our first taste of the strophic refrain to come, with its triplets and grace-notes swaying and rocking like waves on the Bay of Naples. Cardillo meant it when he wrote “con sentimento” to the performers, but who doesn’t love to wallow on occasion in unabashed sentimentality?

The message of “Les berceaux”—adventurous men go on quests to distant lands, while women stay behind, weep, and tend the babies—might make present-day women grind their teeth, were it not for the tenderness Sully-Prudhomme’s men feel for loved ones left behind and the utter beauty of Fauré’s music. This is a cross between a barcarolle (a song to be sung on the waters) and a cradle song; the motion of the rocking cradles is like that of boats on the ocean. That the music seems to be imagined from the women’s point of view is evident in the brief anger and climactic despair at the words about “enticing horizons,” returning almost immediately to the gentler, melancholy swaying of the cradle and the waves.

Another gentle lament follows in Alan Louis Smith’s arrangement of the American folk song “He’s Gone Away.” A young woman sings of her lover who has left—for reasons unknown—and tries, over and over, to reassure herself that he will return, even from a distance of 10,000 miles. Alan Smith fills the song with wave upon wave of rising-and-falling “Nature-music” (some will be distantly reminded of the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold when they hear the piano accompaniment to this song) in the right-hand only; the dreaminess of these strains is due in part to the lack of a deep bass foundation … until lamentation digs deeper in mid-song. The seemingly ceaseless waves that imply, “It is in the nature of things for men to leave and women to grieve,” do stop near the end, exposing the naked lament to the open air in heartrending fashion.

Finally, we end with two songs by a Catalan composer to texts by an Uruguayan poet (Valdés) and an Afro-Cuban poet (Nicolás Guillén). Xavier Montsalvatge, born in Salvador Dali’s birthplace of Girona, learned his musical craft in Barcelona, a city on the cutting edge of new artistic trends and alive with the influences of Manuel de Falla, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg. The song cycle Cinco canciones negras of 1945 is probably his best-known work to date, composed at a time when he was strongly influenced by music from the Antilles (the islands of the West Indies, including Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and many smaller Caribbean islands). The fourth song, “Ninghe, ninghe, ninghe,” is an enchanting lullaby to a little black child reluctant to go to sleep (every parent will recognize the scenario), while the final pyrotechnic song, “Canto negro,” with its irresistible refrain “Yambambó, yambambé!”, is a show-stopper. In the lullaby, we hear a combination of dances: a habanera in the left hand and a calypso in the right hand, the combination perfect for the sweetly teasing tone of this affectionate song. The final work is a rapid calypso, a wild, drunken party brought to sounding life. The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén is known for his focus on the sound and the rhythm of spoken words, which may—as in this song—be deliciously nonsensical.

Nicole Heaston, Soprano
Soprano Nicole Heaston is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. She appears regularly with the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Dallas Opera.

During the 2007–2008 season Nicole Heaston will make her Italian debut as Sabina in Adriano in Siria at the Fondazione Pergolesi in Jesi and also make her debut with the Los Angeles Opera as Musetta in La bohème.

Ms. Heaston’s debut with the Houston Opera was in the title role of Roméo et Juliette, and she was most recently heard as Gilda in Rigoletto.

Ms. Heaston made her European operatic stage debut as Anne Truelove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in Montpellier and sang Zerlina for Deutsche Opera am Rhein in Dusseldorf. She performed the role of Drusilla in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea for her debuts at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence and at the Vienna Festwochen, the role of Eve in Haydn’s The Creation for the Flanders Opera in Belgium, and sang Gluck’s Armide with Les musiciens du Louvre, which was recorded for Archiv Production Deutsche Grammophon.

Nicole Heaston has performed with the Detroit and Indianapolis symphony orchestras; the National Symphony Orchestra (Kennedy Center’s 11th annual gala); Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Handel’s Messiah); the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Fort Worth Symphony Symphony Orchestra (Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4), the Honolulu Symphony (Mozart’s Requiem), and with Boston Baroque (Bach’s B Minor Mass, which was recorded for the Teldec label and nominated for a Grammy Award).

Meagan Miller, Soprano
An accomplished recitalist and noted interpreter of new music, Meagan Miller has appeared in more than 30 professional recitals at such notable venues as Alice Tully Hall, Weill Hall, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Juilliard Theater, Steinway Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Brown University, Princeton University, the Morgan Library, Salzburg’s Schloss Leopoldskron, and the Chrysler Museum. She has premiered many works written specifically for her voice, including Libby Larsen’s Try Me Good King: The Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII and Robert Beaser’s Four Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ms. Miller has also premiered numerous works by Thomas Cipullo, Christopher Berg, and Russell Platt.

In the 2007–2008 Season, Ms. Miller will cover both Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Alice Ford in Falstaff at New York City Opera. She will also make her NYCO debut in October as Giorgetta in an excerpt from Il Tabarro in the Fall Gala Concert. She will also be a featured soloist in the Marilyn Horne Foundation Alumni Gala Concert at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, and the soprano soloist for Verdi’s Requiem at Lehigh University.

On the operatic stage, Ms. Miller has performed Mozart’s Fiordiligi, Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, Konstanze, and Countess Almaviva, as well as Verdi’s Violetta and Desdemona, Puccini’s Musetta, Gounod’s Marguerite, Johann Strauss’s Rosalinda, Gluck’s Euridice, Floyd’s Susannah, and Copland’s Laurie. Her interpretations of these roles have been applauded at the Minnesota Opera, L’Opéra de Montréal, Orlando Opera, Kentucky Opera, Syracuse Opera, Eugene Opera, San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Wolf Trap Opera, the Princeton Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Ms. Miller has completed several residencies with the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the Wolf Trap Foundation, blending outreach and performance. A grand finals winner of the 1999 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Meagan Miller was named “Outstanding Undergraduate Musician” by the Juilliard faculty and was honored with the Juilliard Opera Center’s DeRosa Award. She has also won the Liederkranz Foundation Competition, a Richard Tucker Music Foundation Study Grant, Syracuse Opera’s Season’s Best Performance, and the Joy in Singing Award.

Stephanie Blythe, Mezzo-Soprano
Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is considered to be one of the most highly respected artists of her generation. Ms. Blythe has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and the Opera National de Paris. Her roles include the title roles in Carmen, La Grande Duchesse, Tancredi, Mignon, and Guilio Cesare; Frugola, Principessa, and Zita in the Il Trittico; Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress; Jocasta in Oedipus Rex; Mere Marie in Dialogues des Carmélites; Isabella in L’Italiana in Algeri; Fricka in both Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; Azucena in Il trovatore; Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera; Mistress Quickly in Falstaff; and Ino/Juno in Semele.

This season she returns to the Metropolitan Opera as Ulrica and Fricka, and to the Arizona Opera as Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, as well as makes her debut at the Pittsburgh Opera as Amneris in Aida

Ms. Blythe has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and many more.

Ms. Blythe has been presented in recital with her collaborative partner, Warren Jones, by Zankel Hall, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series, the 92nd Street Y, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Vocal Arts Society and at the Supreme Court at the invitation of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg; the Cleveland Art Song Festival, the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and Shriver Hall in Baltimore.

Guang Yang, Mezzo-Soprano
The 1997 winner of the BBC Singer of the World Competition in Cardiff, Guang Yang recently completed a three-year stay at the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Center for American Artists.

Miss Yang’s upcoming season features returns to the Canadian Opera Company as Eboli in Don Carlos and to the Deutsche Oper in Berlin for Amneris in AidaI, as well as a debut with Opera Omaha in the same role. Other performances include the Verdi Requiem with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Kansas City Symphony, and a New York recital appearance for Marilyn Horne’s birthday gala at Zankel Hall. In the more distant future, Ms. Yang will return to the Lyric Opera of Chicago in a leading role.

Guang Yang’s commitments at the Lyric Opera of Chicago included Flosshilde in Das Rheingold, Grimgerde in Die Walküre, and the Second Norn in Götterdämmerung. Miss Yang made her Dallas Opera debut as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly.

Other engagements have included the role of Lu in Tan Dun’s opera Tea with the Lyon Opera, a concert with Plácido Domingo at the Kennedy Center, Rosina in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Welsh National Opera, Hécube in Berlioz’ Les troyens with the London Symphony Orchestra, the mezzo-soprano solo in Verdi’s Requiem with the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, Mother Marie in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites with the Juilliard Opera Center, a concert at the Cultural Center in Hong Kong, and recitals in the United Kingdom at the Manx International Festival and the Newbury Spring Festival.

Garrett Sorenson, Tenor
Garrett Sorenson is a recent graduate of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Itulbo in Il pirata (conducted by Bruno Campanella) opposite Renée Fleming and also performed the role of Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor conducted by Patrick Summers.

His recent appearances include debuts with The Cleveland Orchestra in Elektra under Franz Welser-Möst as well as with the New York Philharmonic in a program of Viennese music and with the Baltimore Symphony in an aria and duet concert. Future seasons will include debuts with Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Houston Grand Opera.

Mr. Sorenson made his Portland Opera Repertory Theatre (Maine) debut in the role of Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor. Other concert appearances include the Mozart Requiem with the New Choral Society of Central Westchester; his Carnegie Hall debut with The Metropolitan Opera Chamber Ensemble in the presentation of Stravinsky’s Renard; Handel’s Messiah with the New Choral Society of Central Westchester; and the Greater Palm Beach Symphony’s “A Night of Operatic Favorites,” in which he was the featured soloist.

Mr. Sorenson was the winner of the Opera Birmingham Young Singer Contest and the Sorantin Young Artist Award. Mr. Sorenson was named a winner at the 2003 George London Foundation Competition and a Sara Tucker Study Grant Winner. This was followed by a 2004 Richard Tucker Foundation Career Grant.

Rod Gilfry, Baritone
Rod Gilfry is one of today’s most sought-after baritones. His artistry has been seen in all the world’s music capitals, including Vienna, Paris, London, Munich, Zurich, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
In the 2007–2008 season, he will perform Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Tonhalle-Orchester, Zurich. Then, with Dallas Opera, he sings performances of Danilo in The Merry Widow and also returns to Opera Pacific to sing Papageno in The Magic Flute. Mr. Gilfry has also been invited to perform at the annual Marilyn Horne Foundation Gala in February in New York before traveling to Zurich to sing the role of Storch in Strauss’s Intermezzo. Later that season, in Amsterdam, he sings the title role in Messian’s St. François d’Assise. Finally, he travels this summer to Japan for performances of Falke in Die Fledermaus at Seiji Ozawa’s prestigious Saito-Kinen Festival.
In the fall of 2006, he created his fifth world-premiere role as Jack London in the new Libby Larsen / Philip Littell opera, Every Man Jack, in Sonoma, California. Also, in the spring of 2007, he performed the role of De Guiche in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac in Valencia, Spain, opposite Placido Domingo, as well as The Merry Widow at Los Angeles Opera. Additionally last season, he performed his one-man show Rodgers to Rossini in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in March, and in July, he performed with the Chicago Symphony as Joey in Frank Loesser’s musical The Most Happy Fella at the Ravinia Festival.

Evan Hughes, Bass-Baritone
Evan Hughes is currently working on a master’s degree at The Curtis Institute of Music, where he studies with Marlena Kleinman Malas. Mr. Hughes recently made his New York City recital debut after being awarded the 2006 Marilyn Horne Foundation Award at the Music Academy of the West Competition. For the 2006–2007 season of the Curtis Opera Theater, Mr. Hughes performed leading roles including Ariadeno in Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, Perichaud in Puccini’s La rondine, and Bass in Argento’s A Postcard from Morocco. Other upcoming engagements include an appearance with The Philadelphia Orchestra in collaboration with pianist Mikael Eliasen, and the Marilyn Horne Foundation’s national artist residency with the Brownville Music Series in Brownville, Nebraska.

During his two summers as a fellowship recipient and young artist at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, Mr. Hughes worked closely with Marilyn Horne and Warren Jones, and performed the role of Lord Sidney in Rossini’s Il viaggio a Rheims.

Mr. Hughes performed several leading roles with Opera UCLA, including title roles in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi; Lorca: Child of the Moon, a world premier by Ian Krause; The Vicar in Britten’s Albert Herring; Ramiro in Ravel’s L’heure espagnole; and Don Alfonso in Mozart’s Così fan tutte directed by Robin Guarino. He also sang as a soloist in the Mozart Requiem and Bach’s Cantata No. 42.

Margo Garrett, Piano

Warren Jones, Piano
Pianist 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 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 travels have taken him to recitals in Austria, Italy, France, England, Japan, and Hong Kong, as well as theaters throughout Scandinavia and Korea. Mr. Jones has been invited three times by American presidents to perform at the White House, and three times he has appeared at the US 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. 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.

Recent seasons have included his debut with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, performances with the Brentano Quartet, and an invitation to teach a master class at The Juilliard School under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation.

Several recordings with Mr. Jones have caught the public’s ear: on BMG / RCA Red Seal, he is featured with Håkan Hagegård in a recording that was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999; on the Samsung Classics label, with Korean soprano Youngok Shin, in A Dream; and for NPR Classics, a recital of spirituals with Denyce Graves, entitled Angels Watching Over Me. Mr. Jones’s recording of Copland and Ives songs with Samuel Ramey for Decca/Argo was also nominated for a Grammy Award; and he can 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. Each summer he teaches and performs at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. For 10 years he was assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and for three seasons served in the same capacity at San Francisco Opera.

Also a prominent musical jurist, Mr. Jones has been a judge for the Walter Naumberg Foundation Awards, the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, Artists’ Association International Fine Arts Competition, and the American Council for the Arts. In spring of 1997 he joined the jury of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, at Mr. Cliburn’s special invitation.

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

Tamara Sanikidze, Piano
Tamara Sanikidze is a Young Artist Coach in the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program at the Washington Opera. Ms. Sanikidze has won top prizes in several piano competitions and received many scholarships including a personal scholarship from Edward Shevardnadze, former president of the Republic of Georgia. Recently she won the Robert McCoy Award for Excellence in Vocal Accompanying.

In October 2006 and February 2007 she performed two more On Wings of Song recitals with baritones Evan Hughes and Sidney Outlaw. In March 2007 she partnered with Quinn Kelsey for a Vocal Arts Society–Marilyn Horne Foundation recital at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington, DC, and in April, Mr. Kelsey and Ms. Sanikidze presented another recital at Carnegie Hall.

She has been invited to join the musical staff of Virginia Opera for the productions of Lehar’s Merry Widow and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Opera Cleveland for Eugene Onegin and La traviata. During the summers of 2005 to 2007, she attended the Music Academy of the West, as the recipient of the prestigious Fellowship Award in Vocal Piano. Among other events at the Music Academy, she played recitatives in Rossini’s Il viaggio a Rheims and was a rehearsal pianist for Così fan tutte and La bohéme.

Her 2007 season includes recitals with baritone Evan Hughes, soprano Nicole Cabell, and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wör. She will also be on the music staff at the Washington National Opera for Don Giovanni and Hansel und Gretel.

Brian Zeger, Piano
Pianist Brian Zeger has built an important career not only as a pianist but also as an ensemble performer par excellence, radio broadcaster, artistic administrator, and educator.

Mr. Zeger has collaborations with many of the world’s top artists: Itzhak Perlman, James Galway, Claire Bloom; and song recitalists Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, Arleen Auger, Frederica von Stade, Samuel Ramey, Susan Graham, Bryn Terfel, Maria Bayo, René Pape, Thomas Hampson, and Joyce DiDonato. Upcoming engagements include recitals with Deborah Voigt, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Denyce Graves, Hei-Kyung Hong, Adrianne Pieczonka, Juliane Banse, and Isabel Leonard.

Mr. Zeger has been a regular guest at many festivals, including Aspen, Ravinia, Caramoor, Aldeburgh, and Santa Fe. He collaborates regularly with An die Musik, the New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensembles, and the Boston Pops.

Some of his critical essays and writings have appeared in Opera News, The Yale Review, and Chamber Music magazine. He has adjudicated the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, the Concert Artists Guild auditions, and the Walter W. Naumberg Vocal Competition. His recordings may be heard on the EMI Classics, New World, Naxos and Koch record labels.

Mr. Zeger serves as Artistic Director of the Vocal Arts Department at The Juilliard School, and Director of the Vocal Program at the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival. He has been on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, the Chautauqua Institute, the Mannes College of Music, and the Peabody Conservatory.