CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Measha Brueggergosman
Roger Vignoles

Zankel Hall
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Roger Vignoles, Piano

BRITTEN "Tell Me the Truth About Love"
BRITTEN "Johnny"
BRITTEN "Calypso"
BRITTEN "Funeral Blues"
ROREM "Early in the Morning"
ROREM Ferry Me Across the Water from The Nantucket Songs
ROREM "For Poulenc"
SCHOENBERG "Galathea"
SCHOENBERG "Gigerlette"
SCHOENBERG "Der genügsame Liebhaber"
SCHOENBERG "Mahnung"
SCHOENBERG "Arie aus dem Spiegel von Arkadien"
POULENC "Hôtel" from Banalités, No. 2
POULENC "L'anguille" from Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire, No. 1
POULENC "Violon" from Fiançailles pour rire, No. 5
POULENC "C'est ainsi que tu es" from Métamorphoses, No. 2
POULENC "Voyage à Paris" from Banalités, No. 4
WILLIAM BOLCOM "George" from Cabaret Songs
WILLIAM BOLCOM "The Total Stranger in the Garden" from Cabaret Songs
SATIE "Daphénéo"
SATIE "La diva de l'Empire"
WILLIAM BOLCOM "Amor" from Cabaret Songs

Encores:
TRAD. "Ride on, King Jesus"
DAVID BAKER / SHELDON HARNICK "Someone is Sending Me Flowers"
"The Old Dope Peddler"

This concert and the Pure Voice series are sponsored by the Jean & Jula Goldwurm Memorial Foundation in memory of Jula Goldwurm.

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

BENJAMIN BRITTEN Cabaret Songs
Born November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft; died December 4, 1976, in Aldeburgh.

The shy Benjamin Britten, like the shy Schubert, enjoyed improvising at the piano on social occasions and was an excellent jazz pianist. These four cabaret songs to texts by Britten’s mentor, the great poet Wystan Hugh Auden, were written for the singer-diseuse Hedli Anderson, wife of the poet Louis MacNeice and sometime leader of the chorus line at the Trocadero Grillroom in Picadilly. “Calypso” was the last of the poems to be written and the last to be set to music; here, Auden evokes the occasion of rushing to Grand Central Station to meet his new lover Chester Kallman. The poem apes Afro-Caribbean / West Indian rhythms and diction, and Britten sets it to a witty, exciting imitation of a train (foreshadowing “Midnight on the Great Western” from Britten’s Thomas Hardy song cycle Winter Words of 1953). One hears the title “Johnny” and thinks of “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy Ending by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, but this song is a set of variations in which each stage of the story ends with the beloved Johnny frowning like thunder and going away. We hear pseudo-folksong, a polka or square dance, a delicious “send up” of the inanities to which Italian opera is, alas, sometimes prone, a slow waltz in French cabaret style, and a bit of blues. “Tell me the Truth About Love” is in Cole Porter–mode, with a vamping accompaniment and classical allusions to remind us that sophisticated folk created this non-naive repertory. Beginning with declensions of the Latin for “love,” the persona muses, “Some say that love’s a little boy” (Cupid) “and some say it’s a bird” (the Holy Spirit). The text of “Funeral Blues” became newly famous for its appearance in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral; the Scottish actor John Hannah recites it at the funeral of his movie-lover, dead from a surfeit of Scottish dancing. Britten’s music is not nearly black enough to be the blues, although it approximates them at a distance; originally composed as incidental music for Auden’s play The Ascent of F6, this lament builds to a peak of tragic intensity by the end.

NED ROREM “Early in the Morning”; “Ferry Me Across the Water,” from The Nantucket Songs; “For Poulenc”
Born October 23, 1923, in Richmond, Indiana.

The American composer Ned Rorem is the creator of songs in a dazzling array of forms, genres, moods, manners, and types, set to an encyclopedic array of poetic texts. His affinity with all things French is on display in songs like “Early in the Morning” and “For Poulenc,” distillations of every American francophile’s wistful memories of Paris. Between these songs is a change of venue: “Ferry Me Across the Water” comes from Rorem’s Nantucket Songs, but the text hails from 19th-century England and Christina Rossetti of “Goblin Market” fame (the poem taken from her anthology Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book of 1872). A delicately mournful tactus sounds throughout a song whose boatman could, after all, be Death. The final, fiendishly difficult (because of the soft) high G-sharp for the singer at the end invests the word “you” with unforgettable poignant emphasis.

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG From Brettl-Lieder: “Galathea,” “Gigerlette,” “Der genügsame Liebhaber,” “Mahnung,” “Arie aus dem Spiegel von Arcadien”
Born September 13, 1874, in Vienna; died July 13, 1951, in Los Angeles.

Cabaret in Berlin began with discussions between the dramatist Frank Wedekind and the poet Otto Julius Bierbaum, both devotees of the Parisian cabaret. Their desire to create a uniquely German offshoot led, first, to Bierbaum’s popular anthology of music-hall poems entitled Deutsche Chansons (German Songs), published in 1900, and, shortly thereafter, the opening of the Überbrettl by an amateur poet named Baron Ernst von Wolzogen, who would later blame “the Jews” for the failure of his enterprise. (“Brettl” was the term for mini-stages, halls, or cafés, where singing and dancing took place; Wolzogen—a fan of Nietzsche’s writing—added the prefix “über,” with the Nietzschean “Übermensch” or “superman” in mind.) One of those Jewish artists was Arnold Schoenberg, who married Alexander Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, in October 1901 and then moved the Berlin the following month, on contract to Wolzogen’s Buntes Theater. In “Galathea,” the singer yearns to kiss the cheeks, hair, hands, knees, and feet of the enchanting Galathea—but this is fantasy, not reality. No matter how often this music rises and swells in chromatic desire, reciprocity (much less consummation) is not to be; the myth of the one-eyed monster Polyphemus in love with the beautiful Galatea, who is in love with Acis, comes to life in very modern dress indeed. “Gigerlette” is the perfect song to summon up images of all those German films in which beautiful actresses and singers receive their multiple lovers in brocade-embellished red chambers emblematic of illicit passion. “Der genügsame Liebhaber” plays some of the same naughty word games with “pussy” as in the English language to tell of a prostitute whose client dislodges her cat from its accustomed spot and places it on his bald head, to the tune of Schoenberg’s feline, purring trills and catlike-ironic figures in the piano. “Mahnung” is tongue-in-cheek advice to a “maiden” to find the right man, someone who knows how to kiss (and more), and then snap him up in a jiffy lest she end up an old maid. In the “Arie aus dem Spiegel von Arcadien,” we encounter the librettist of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in a wonderfully silly mood. To the sensual strains of a Viennese waltz and a swooping, swooning melody, the persona swears three times that women make his heart go “Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.”

FRANCIS POULENC “Hôtel,” from Banalités, No. 2; “L’anguille,” from Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire, No. 1; “Violon,” from Fiançailles pour rire, No. 5; “C’est ainsi que tu es,” from Métamorphoses, No. 2; “Voyage à Paris,” from Banalités, No. 4
Born January 7, 1899, in Paris; died there January 30, 1963.

The importance of verse by Guillaume Apollinaire (the half-Italian /Swiss, half Italian/Polish illegitimate son of Angelica Alexandrine Kostrovitski and Francesco Flugi d’Aspermont), who died in the great flu pandemic of 1918, for Francis Poulenc can hardly be over-stated: by 1954, he had composed 34 songs to Apollinaire’s poetry. “Hôtel” is the very essence of languorous laziness (elegant, smoke-wreathed, French laziness, of course, from a bygone time when cigarettes were an elegant accoutrement). One can almost hear the accordion in “L’anguille,” a valse-musette in best “caf’-conc’” style (café-concert). Louise de Vilmorin—friend to Jean Cocteau and, at the end of her life, companion to the statesman André Malraux— was Poulenc’s preferred woman poet (so that he could write for the female voice as well) from 1937 on; he sang (literally) the praises of her “sensitive impertinence, libertinage, and appetite.” The exquisite “C’est ainsi que tu es” is the centerpiece of the Métamorphoses; it is the epitome of tender promiscuity—we begin by invoking “la chair,” or flesh—whose protagonists understand that one must move on to another lover and do so in meditative, melancholy mode. Vilmorin had married a Hungarian playboy-aristocrat, Count Paul Pálffy ab Erdöd in 1938; when the marriage broke up, she became the mistress of another Hungarian nobleman, Graf Thomas Paul Esterházy de Galántha, who left his wife for her in 1942. She knew Hungarian nightclubs, and for her poem “Violon,” Poulenc conjures up a perfect sound-picture of just such a place, complete with gypsy violinist. No wonder this is one of his most popular songs. And finally, we return to Apollinaire for the giddy waltz-song, “Voyage à Paris,” which used to be the great singer Pierre Bernac’s and Poulenc’s ever-so-slightly malicious final encore at recitals in the provinces. “For me,” Poulenc wrote, “Paris often brings tears to my eyes and music to my ears.”

WILLIAM BOLCOM “George,” from Cabaret Songs; “The Total Stranger in the Garden,” from Cabaret Songs
Born May 26, 1938, in Seattle, Washington.

The collaboration of William Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein began when Darius Milhaud asked the young Weinstein, in Italy on a Fulbright grant, to write a libretto for him; when the final result was too American for Milhaud’s taste, the text was handed over to Milhaud’s American student, William Bolcom. Weinstein, a witty and learned man who knew Greek, Latin, Yiddish, and Ladino, among other languages, also knew cabaret inside out and gave his collaborator sophisticated words for sophisticated songs. The narrator of “George” mourns the boozy, lonely, sweet chanteuse-transvestite—“Call me Georgia, hon”—who was his or her friend, stabbed to death by a homophobic sailor. Much of this elegy-with-a-difference is in foxtrot-and-cocktail-party mode because that is what the dead man would have liked, but thoughts of this gentle, opera-loving creature’s violent end lead to an explosion of angry feeling at the close. When we hear of George/Georgia putting Puccini’s “Un bel dì vedremo” on his phonograph player, we wince; Madame Butterfly died by the knife in the wake of rejected love as well. To the accompaniment of eerie, perpetual motion strains in the piano, like quietly frantic thoughts, the woman who sings “The Total Stranger in the Garden” confronts the harsh truth of estrangement in marriage. She never knew her husband, she realizes, will never know him; we hear her anger at the impasse and also the sheer strangeness of the experience. Cabaret has always had much to say about isolation in the intimate company of others, whether a one-night stand or a spouse.
ERIK SATIE “Daphénéo,” “La diva de l’Empire”
Born May 17, 1866, in Honfleur; died July 1, 1925, in Paris.

The cabarets of Montmartre were a revelation for a shy, bourgeois young man named Erik Satie in the 1890s; a bohemian in grey velvet suits, he had a stormy affair with Suzanne Valadon (the artist Maurice Utrillo’s mother), picked a fight with Colette’s husband Willy, and began the formation of his unique style. But Montmartre changed; by the time Satie was forced by poverty to earn a living as a café-concert pianist between 1898 and 1904, he considered it a “great lowering” of his compositional vocation. To break away from such an existence, he studied music at the Schola Cantorum for a time and finally began to achieve a measure of fame just before, during, and after the war years. The composition of “Daphénéo” is sandwiched between such piano works as the Avant-dernières pensées and the famous Diaghilev-Picasso-Léonide Massine-Cocteau-Satie ballet Parade; its text attributed to “God” (Satie’s friend Mimi Godebska), this song about a child encountering a new concept issues from a composer who was either a sophisticated child or childlike adult, take your pick. The years circa 1900 may have been the nadir of Satie’s life, but there is no denying that he wrote irresistible caf’-conc’ songs, including “La diva de l’Empire.” The “Empire” is the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, a notorious promenade for ladies of the evening and their customers, and the “diva” was probably Lilly Elsie (1886–1962), a young star who would have her greatest success in Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow in 1907. The “chapeau Greenaway” alludes to the English artist Kate Greenaway (1846–1901), famous for her drawings of children; that being young or mimicking youth has its erotic allure is the point.

WILLIAM BOLCOM “Amor,” from Cabaret Songs
And finally, we return to the Bolcom-Weinstein collaboration for a celebration of erotic desire in pachanga tempo (a 1950s Latin American dance that originated in Cuba and is invoked in the film Dirty Dancing). Here, no one can resist Love, not the policeman, the ice cream vendor, the philosopher, the rich, the poor, or the judge; even church choirs sing “Amor” instead of “Amen.” It is not “caritas” this choir hymns but eros, or the allure of beautiful flesh, transformed into seductive, “come-on” music. At the end, we hear Amor leaving the town, en route to another, where she can work her ages-old enchantment … just the right note on which to exit this recital.

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.

Measha Brueggergosman, Soprano
Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman has emerged as one of the most magnificent performers and vibrant personalities of the day. She is critically acclaimed by the international press as much for her innate musicianship and voluptuous voice as for a sovereign stage presence far beyond her years. Her extraordinary versatility, intuitive musicality, and radiant star quality have yielded an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Her first recording on the label, Surprise, was released in North America in fall 2007.

A dynamic scope of repertoire coupled with a profound depth of artistic commitment bring Measha Brueggergosman together with many of the finest international orchestras and most esteemed conductors of our day. During the 2007–08 season, performances include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Pinchas Zukerman and the National Arts Centre Orchestra and with Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass with Michael Tilson Thomas for her London Symphony Orchestra debut, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été with Vasily Petrenko and the NDR Hannover Orchestra, and Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi with David Robertson and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Deeply committed to the art of recital, Measha Brueggergosman brings a program inspired by her Deutsche Grammophon recording, featuring songs by, among others, Bolcom, Satie, and Schoenberg, to many of North America’s major cultural centers including Boston, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Washington DC, as well as to numerous cities in Brazil, Great Britain, and Spain.

During the 2006–07 season, her concert schedule included performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra (in Cleveland and on tour), Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, Daniel Barenboim and the Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alla Scala, and Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen; opera arias with Sir Andrew Davis and the New York Philharmonic; Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra; Gershwin songs with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Glasgow’s Proms in the Park concert, and, with Gustavo Dudamel; and performances of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and of Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra on tour in Sweden, Paris, and in London. She also gave solo recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels with Roger Vignoles, in Gstaad with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and at Hertz Hall in Berkeley and at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor with J. J. Penna.

Beyond the great concert halls of the world, Ms. Brueggergosman lends her voice, passion, and energy to social and environmental causes as a Canadian good-will ambassador for three international organizations: African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), Learning Through the Arts, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Her commitments to these organizations have taken her on a broad spectrum of missions from primary schools in New Brunswick, Canada, to internally displaced persons camps of northern Uganda.

Measha Brueggergosman has been the subject of a full-length feature documentary, Spirit in her Voice, aired by the CBC network, and she has starred in numerous independent short music-films including Go Diva! and Infinite Dream.

Measha Brueggergosman was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2002 Jeunesses Musicales Montreal International Competition and has been a prizewinner at The Dutch International Vocal Competition in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Queen Sonja International Music Competition in Oslo, and the ARD Music Competition in Munich.

Roger Vignoles, Piano
The pianist Roger Vignoles is one of Britain’s most outstanding musicians. Originally inspired by the playing of Gerald Moore, he decided to pursue a career as a piano accompanist, completing his essential training with the distinguished Viennese-born pianist Paul Hamburger.

Since then, reviewers worldwide have consistently recognized his distinctive qualities as a player. Among his first partners was the great Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström, whom he regularly accompanied throughout the 1970s and 80s. During this period, he also developed particularly fruitful collaborations with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa; with Sir Thomas Allen, recording many works including Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Winterreise; and with Sarah Walker, in a wide repertoire of song, from German lieder and French mélodies to cabaret songs by Gershwin, Britten, and others.

Recent seasons have included tours with Sylvia McNair, Dame Felicity Lott, Susan Graham, Véronique Gens, Sir Thomas Allen, and Joan Rodgers, as well as recitals with Olaf Bär, Kathleen Battle, Christine Brewer, Brigitte Fassbaender, Bernarda Fink, Christine Schaefer, Thomas Hampson, Lorraine Hunt, Stephan and Christoph Genz, Monica Groop, and Sarah Walker, including appearances at the Bath, Cheltenham, Brighton, Aldeburgh, Prague, Schleswig-Holstein, Verbier, and Ravinia Festivals. He is also a regular visitor to the Schubertiade in Feldkirch.

He has devised and directed many festivals, highlights of which include, in 1997 a week-long Schubert series entitled “Landscape into Song” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, in which his culminating performance of Winterreise with Robert Holl. In 1998, he inaugurated the Nagaoka Winter Festival in Japan, giving recitals and master classes based on Schubert’s Winterreise and subsequently returned each year as artistic director until 2002. Most recently, in 2007, he was the Artistic Director of Leeds Lieder +, a weekend of song with artists including Mark Padmore, Measha Bruggergosman, Florian Boesch, and Elizabeth Watts.

Among his recordings, La Belle Epoque with Susan Graham (devoted to the songs of Reynaldo Hahn), Nuits d’Etoiles with Véronique Gens (Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc), and a CD of Strauss, Mahler, and Marx with Katarina Karneus all have been nominated for Gramophone awards, while his recording of Beethoven songs with Stephan Genz on Hyperion won the 1999 Award in the song category. Recent releases include the complete Wolf Mörike-Lieder with Stephan Genz and Canciones Amatorias, a CD of Spanish Songs with Bernarda Fink and Strauss Songs with Christine Brewer on Hyperion.

Future engagements include recitals tours with Kate Royal and Measha Brueggergosman in North America, and recitals with Elizabeth Watts, John Mark Ainsley, Bruce Ford, Robert Holl, Miah Persson, Wolfgang Holzmair, and Mark Padmore.