CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Nathan Gunn
Julie Gunn

Zankel Hall
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Nathan Gunn, Baritone
Julie Gunn, Piano
Sonia Warfel, Dancer and Choreographer
Laura Chiaramonte, Video Design and Choreographer
David Warfel, Lighting Designer
Jason Lindahl, Assistant Lighting Designer

MESSIAEN "Regard du Pere" from Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus
FRANK FERKO Five Songs on Poems of Thomas Merton
·· In Silence
·· Wisdom
·· The Evening of Visitation
·· Reduced to This
·· Song for Nobody
MESSIAEN "Regard du Fils sur le Fils" from Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus
FRANK FERKO "For my Brother, Reported Missing in Action, 1943"
MESSIAEN "Regard de l'Esprit de joie" from Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus
BARBER Hermit Songs, Op. 29
·· At St. Patrick's Purgatory
·· Church Bells at Night
·· St. Ita's Vision
·· The Heavenly Banquet
·· The Crucifixion
·· Sea-Snatch
·· Promiscuity
·· The Monk and His Cat
·· The Praises of God
·· The Desire for Hermitage

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

Program Notes:

By Paul Griffiths

OLIVIER MESSIAEN Regard du Père, from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
Born December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France; died April 28, 1992, in Paris.

Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (“Twenty Watchings over the Child Jesus”) was the last of three works Messiaen wrote in 1943–44 with his pupil—later his wife—Yvonne Loriod in mind. First had come a two-piano work he could play with her, Visions de l’Amen, then a concerto with psalmodizing women’s voices, Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine, and finally Vingt Regards, a full recital program, with pieces of greatly different character linked by recurrent musical themes. Messiaen composed the work during the spring and summer of 1944, in a Paris that was moving toward, and achieving, liberation from Nazi occupation; the work was finished just two weeks after De Gaulle re-entered the city. A corresponding obduracy and exhilaration may be impressed into the music, though, as far as Messiaen was concerned, his motivation was entirely religious. As he put it at the head of his note in the printed music, the work is “contemplation of the God-Child in the crib and watchings over him.”

The idea of the regard, the spiritual gaze, came from the devotional book Le Christ dans ses mystères by the Irish-Belgian Benedictine abbot Dom Columba Marmion. Messiaen’s first regard is that of the Father, based on a chordal “theme of God” placed in the bass, with the marking: “Extremely slow—mysterious, with love.”


FRANK FERKO Five Songs on Poems of Thomas Merton
Born 1950, in Barberton, Ohio.

Frank Ferko began his career as an organist and choirmaster while still at high school. He studied at Valparaiso, Syracuse, and Northwestern universities, and remained in Chicago for three decades before moving to California. Most of his work as composer and performer has been in the realms of choral and organ music, with Messiaen and Hildegard von Bingen among his models. Notable works include The Hildegard Organ Cycle (1990–91) and a setting of the Stabat Mater for choir with soprano solo (1997–98).

The composer has written the following about the Merton Songs:

In August 2004, after Nathan and Julie Gunn had performed my setting of Thomas Merton’s “For My Brother” several times, Nathan and I discussed the possibility of my writing a few new songs. In September and October I wrote these five, with the idea they could be performed either as a set or individually.

The five songs give brief glimpses into the philosophy, religious beliefs, sense of humor, and poetic skill of one of the most insightful writers America has produced. While Thomas Merton searched for answers to many of life’s questions, his poems often articulated those questions or presented the poet’s own observations about life or about events of the world in which he lived.
As a Trappist, Merton regarded silence very highly. The first poem in this set, “In Silence,” asks significant questions about silence in our lives, about comprehending who we are, and even about the risks that silence causes us to take.

In “Wisdom,” the poet somewhat humorously contrasts the concepts of knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge here is depicted rather academically by the E-minor counterpoint of the piano, and later wisdom is portrayed with a bit more free-flowing joy.

Throughout his life Thomas Merton wrote a considerable number of poems devoted to the Virgin Mary, and during the 1940s alone he completed 25 poems with Marian content. One of those poems, titled “The Evening of the Visitation,” describes Mary’s journey through rural fields and woods to visit the house of Elizabeth and Zachary, who were about to become the parents of John the Baptist. The poet describes nature’s reverential acknowledgement of Mary’s special presence as she passed by and concludes with a short prayer to her.

“Reduced to This” expresses, somewhat humorously, the poet’s frustration in using language to communicate. While reading this text with the intention of creating a musical setting, I could not help but make an association between the poet’s frustrations and those of many composers in the past century who experimented endlessly with new techniques but often ended up with little or no content in their music. Merton’s first two lines express the feeling concisely: “Alone/With nothing to say.”

Images of nature are frequent and abundant in Thomas Merton’s poetry (as the third poem in this set has already demonstrated). So it is appropriate that the final song in this set was inspired by a flower which blossomed off-season—all by itself—in my dining room window while I was writing this music. At about the same time that this lone flower appeared, I also discovered a tiny bunch of marigolds growing out of a crack in the concrete sidewalk behind my apartment building in Chicago. Perhaps the flowers were initially singing for nobody, but I think not. They were singing to me.”


OLIVIER MESSIAEN Regard du Fils sur le Fils, from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus

Messiaen’s note reads: “Mystery, rays of light in the night—refraction of joy, the birds of silence—the person of the Word taking human nature—marriage of human and divine natures in Jesus Christ . . . It clearly concerns the Son-Word regarding the Son-Child. Three sonorities, three modes, three rhythms, three musics superimposed. ‘Theme of God’ and rhythmic canon by the addition of a dot. Joy symbolized by bird songs.”

The “theme of God” is repeated from “Regard du Père,” again in Messiaen’s second mode (F sharp–G–A–A-sharp–B-sharp–C-sharp–D-sharp–E–F-sharp), but now an octave higher and accompanied by a rhythmic canon in which the two chordal voices, expressing different modes, proceed at speeds in the ratio 2:3. The canon yields three times to bird song.


FRANK FERKO “For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943”

“For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943” was one of Thomas Merton’s earliest published poems. Merton at the time was a Trappist novice, newly arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky; his younger brother John Paul had died on a bombing mission.

“Musical sparseness and chromatic intensity,” Mr. Ferko notes, “are used to underscore the dramatic poetry.”


OLIVIER MESSIAEN Regard de l’Esprit de joie, from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus

This big piece forms the finale to the cycle’s first half. Messiaen writes: “Vehement dance, drunken sound of horns, delirium of the Holy Spirit . . . the happy Father’s love-joy in the soul of Jesus Christ . . . I have always been very taken with the fact that God is happy—and that this ineffable, continuous joy inhabits the soul of Jesus Christ. Joy that is for me a delirium, a drunkenness, in the craziest sense of the term. Form: Oriental dance in the extreme bass, in unequal neumes, like plainsong. First development on the ‘theme of joy.’ Asymmetric enlargement. Sort of hunting air in three variations. Second development on the ‘theme of joy’ and the ‘theme of God.’ Reprise of the oriental dance, extreme treble and extreme bass together. Coda on the ‘theme of joy.’”

It remains only to add that Messiaen’s “unequal neumes” are irregular groupings of equal pulses (two-three-four-two-three-three, etc.); that his “asymmetric enlargement” progressively changes the shape of a five-note trilled phrase by moving the first and fourth notes up a half step each time, while the second and third notes go similarly down and the last note stays where it is; and that the hunting interlude is longer than the composer’s synopsis might imply.


SAMUEL BARBER Hermit Songs, Op. 29
Born 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania; died 1981, in New York.

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

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

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

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

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

Nathan Gunn, Baritone
Nathan Gunn has made a reputation as one of the most exciting and in-demand baritones of the day. This season, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera as Mercutio in Roméo et Juliette (including a performance broadcast live in HD in movie theaters around the world), the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and the London Symphony Orchestra as the title role in a concert version of Billy Budd. This spring, he makes four appearances at Carnegie Hall: in concert with the Atlanta Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, in his recital debut in Zankel Hall, and as Gaylord Ravenal in a concert version of Show Boat. Other upcoming engagements include world premiere performances of Peter Eötvös’s Love and Other Demons at the Glyndebourne Festival and André Previn’s Brief Encounter at the Houston Grand Opera, his debut at the Los Angeles Opera as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, and returns to the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Zurga in Les pêcheurs de perles and the Opera Company of Philadelphia as Tarquinius in The Rape of Lucrecita.

Mr. Gunn has appeared in such internationally renowned opera houses as the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Seattle Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Paris Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Glyndebourne Festival, and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. His many roles include the title roles in Billy Budd and Hamlet, Papageno, Guglielmo, Figaro, the Count, Zurga in Les pêcheurs de perles, and Ottone in L’incoronazione di Poppea. He also created the role of Clyde Griffiths in the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s opera An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera.

Also a distinguished concert performer, Mr. Gunn has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Münchner Rundfunkorchster, and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. The many conductors with whom he has worked include Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Colin Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Alan Gilbert, Daniel Harding, James Levine, Kurt Masur, Kent Nagano, Antonio Pappano, Donald Runnicles, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Mark Wigglesworth.

A frequent recitalist, Mr. Gunn has also been presented in recital at Alice Tully Hall by both Lincoln Center’s Art of the Song Series and the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, and by Cal Performances, the Schubert Club, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the University of Chicago, the Krannert Center, the Wigmore Hall, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and the Vocal Arts Society in Washington, DC. As a student, he performed in series of recitals with his teacher and mentor John Wustman that celebrated the 200th anniversary of Franz Schubert’s birth.

Mr. Gunn is an exclusive recording artist for Sony/BMG Masterworks, and his first solo album for the label, Just Before Sunrise, was released in August 2007. Other recordings include Peter Grimes with Sir Colin Davis and London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live!), which was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award; Il barbiere di Siviglia (Sony Classics), Kullervo with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Telarc), and his debut album, a collection of American songs entitled American Anthem (EMI). He also starred as Buzz Aldrin in Man on the Moon, an opera written specifically for television and broadcast on the BBC in the UK in December 2006. The program was recently awarded the G olden Rose Award for Opera at the Montreux Festival in Lucerne.

Mr. Gunn was the recipient of the first annual Beverly Sills Artist Award, and was recently awarded the Pittsburgh Opera Renaissance Award. He is an alumnus of the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists Program and was the winner of the 1994 Metropolitan Opera National Council Competition. He is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he still makes his home, and was recently awarded a professorship by the university.

Julie Gunn, Piano
Dr. Julie Gunn maintains a busy career performing and arranging art songs and coaching singers. She has served on the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists’ Development Program, Wolf Trap, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera North, Illinois Opera Theatre, Theatreworks!, and Southern Methodist University.

Dr. Gunn and her husband, baritone Nathan Gunn, made their joint recital debut in 1998 at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and have since performed recitals in venues worldwide.

Dr. Gunn is very interested in traditional and contemporary American songs and has made numerous arrangements for solo voice or chorus. Her orchestrations of Gene Scheer’s Voices of World War II has been performed in Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign, Illinois. She received her doctoral degree in June 2001 from the University of Illinois, where she specialized in the songs of Richard Strauss under her mentor, the distinguished accompanist John Wustman.

Dr. Gunn makes her home in Champaign with her husband and five young children.

Sonia Warfel, Dancer and Choreographer

Laura Chiaramonte, Video Design and Choreographer

David Warfel, Lighting Designer

Jason Lindahl, Assistant Lighting Designer