CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
David Daniels
Martin Katz

Zankel Hall
Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

David Daniels, Countertenor
Martin Katz, Piano

BRAHMS "Auf dem See," Op. 59, No. 2
BRAHMS "Ständchen," Op. 106, No. 1
BRAHMS "Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen," Op. 32, No. 2
BRAHMS "Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund"
BRAHMS "O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück," Op. 63, No. 8
PERI "Gioite al canto mio" from Euridice
DURANTE "Danza, danza fanciulla"
CACCINI "Amarilli, mia bella"
FRESCOBALDI "Cosi mi disprezzate"
HAHN "À Chloris"
HAHN "Quand je fus pris au pavillon"
HAHN "Chanson au bord de la fontaine"
HAHN "Paysage"
HANDEL "Cara sposa" from Rinaldo
HANDEL "Furibondo spira il vento" from Partenope
QUILTER "Music, When Soft Voices Die," Op. 25
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS "Linden Lea"
ELGAR "Where Corals Lie," Op. 37, No. 4
HOWELLS "King David"
TRADITIONAL "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" (arr. Roger Quilter)
GERALD FINZI "It was a Lover," Op. 18

Encores:
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS "Orpheus with His Lute"
PURCELL "I'll Sail Upon the Dog Star"
HANDEL "Gia l'ebro mio ciglio" from Orlando

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

JOHANNES BRAHMS “Auf dem See,” Op. 59, No. 2; “Ständchen,” Op. 106, No. 1; “Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen,” Op. 32, No. 2; “Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund”; “O wüsst’ ich doch den Weg zurück,” Op. 63, No. 8
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Brahms began his compositional life with song and works for piano, and he would never abandon songwriting, whatever his ambitions in large instrumental forms. In “Auf dem See” (“At the Lake”), the singer’s melody swings and sways above a lilting left-hand part, as if the music too was in a boat on an idyllic lake; in the middle of the song, the persona counsels his wounded heart to imbibe peace and happiness from Nature’s bounty. In the late masterpiece “Ständchen” (“Serenade”), we hear folkloric-Germanic nostalgia in a nutshell: moonlight over the mountains, a fountain splashing in the gardens, and three blond students serenading a beloved who whispers “Forget me not” in her dreams. Brahms responds by roving lightly between various transient tonalities, as if from one beautiful place to another; appropriately enough for a song about student life and loves, the song is related in some of its musical procedures to Brahms’s “Academic Festival Overture.” Brahms’s devoted friend and biographer Max Kalbeck described the nine songs of Op. 32 as “a sort of lyric Novelle … a highly personal history of the heart.” The second song in the set, “Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen” (“To Visit You No Longer”), is a bleak thing to a text about erotic obsession from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s “The Moldau” in Polydora, ein weltpoetisches Liederbuch (“Polydora, a world-poetic songbook”) of 1855. Daumer was far from being a great poet—some of the composer’s friends were offended by the eroticism on display in his works—but he was a favorite of Brahms’s and the source for a number of his most beautiful songs. Here, the singer’s fragmented phrases give the impression of humiliating admissions being dragged from the persona bit by reluctant, gasping bit. In 1860, in a letter to Clara Schumann, Brahms wrote, “Song composition is currently sailing on so false a course that one cannot sufficiently remind oneself of an ideal—and that to me is folk song.” Both Brahms’s musical aesthetic and his complex but very real sense of German nationalism entailed a lifelong fascination with folk song, both supposed folk melodies arranged either as solo songs or choral works and a “folk-like” manner in his own original compositions. (One of Brahms’s sources for folk melodies was largely the work of one Anton Florentin Zuccalmaglio, more composer and manipulator than collector. When Brahms found out about the deception, he reportedly shrugged and said, “Not really folk music? Oh well, so we have one more good composer, and for him I do not have to apologize, as I do for myself,” the modesty about his own achievement typical of this man.) The completion of the 49 German Folksongs in 1894 seemed to him a symbolic completion of his musical life, and “Mein Mädel hat einen Rosenmund” (“My Lassie’s Mouth Is Like a Rosebud”) is one of the merriest of the lot. A paean to the nut-brown maiden of many a German folk song, its rapturous repetitions, “Oh you, oh you, oh you!” are the essence of love’s ebullience. In utter contrast, “O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück” (“Oh, If I Only Knew the Road Back”) is ultimate Brahmsian nostalgia for childhood, for home, for the past, for all that is irretrievably gone. Before the singer enters, we hear rising and falling waves of chromatic musing. There are too many telling details of this song to enumerate them all, but the harmonic shift at the words “O warum sucht ich nach dem Glück” (“Oh, why did I seek happiness [and let go of my mother’s hand?]”) in the song’s initial section—we are briefly in another place and time—and its darker, elongated, more brooding variation at song’s end are among them.

JACOPO PERI “Gioite al canto mio,” from Euridice
Born August 20, 1561, in Rome or Florence; died August 12, 1633, in Florence.
FRANCESCO DURANTE “Danza, danza fanciulla”
Born March 31, 1684 in Frattamaggiore, Aversa; died September 30, 1755, in Naples.
GIULIO CACCINI “Amarilli, mia bella”
Born October 8, 1551, in Rome; buried December 10, 1618, in Florence.
GIROLAMO FRESCOBALDI “Così mi disprezzate” 
Baptized mid-September of 1583 in Ferrara; died March 1, 1643, in Rome.

In the mid-1570s and for some ten years thereafter, a group of artists, poets, and intellectuals met in Florence at the home of Giovanni de’ Bardi, Count of Vernio, where their exchange of ideas resulted in a new genre—opera—and a new style of solo song; Bardi’s son Pietro later remembered the composer Jacopo Peri singing and playing keyboard instruments, probably at the sessions of the so-called Camerata. “Gioite al canto mio” (“Rejoice at My Song”) comes from the earliest opera for which the complete score survives: Euridice, composed in the symbolically significant year of 1600 for the Florentine celebrations of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV, King of France. The ancient Greek myth of the poet-singer Orpheus, who persuades the king and queen of the Underworld to return his beloved Euridice (poisoned by a snake bite on their wedding day), is symbolic of the power of music even over death; it is no wonder that composers have been, still are, drawn to it. In most versions of the tale, Orpheus loses Euridice a second time when he looks back on the return journey to make sure that she is following him, against the Underworld’s orders not to do so, but such tragedy would hardly do for royal nuptials. Instead, Peri and his librettist Ottavio Rinuccini provided a happy ending, one in which the couple returns undisturbed to the land of the living, where Orpheus, probably performed at the premiere by Peri himself, sings this song of rejoicing. This merry ditty is followed by another winsome, seductive “song”: Francesco Durante’s “Danza, danza fanciulla” (“Dance, Dance Gentle Young Girl”) included in most anthologies of 18th-century song. Durante was famous for his church music and his outstanding abilities as a music teacher; this work is actually a solfeggio, an exercise for solo voice, to which words and piano accompaniment were added in the 19th century. Those were lucky long-ago students to be so attractively taught their art, and we are lucky to have its later arrangement as a song.

Three nights after the premiere of his Euridice, Peri sang in another wedding festival opera (Il Rapimento di Cefalo) by another member of the Florentine Camerata, Giulio Caccini, who was trained in his native city of Rome as a singer, lute player, and harpist, and then entered the service of the Medici court in Florence in the mid-1560s, where he remained until his death. He too was a renowned singer, praised for the “dolcezza,” “soavità” (lyrical gentleness, sweetness) and agility of his tenor voice. “Amarilli, mia bella” (“Amaryllis, My Lovely One”) comes from one of the most famous song anthologies of all time, Le Nuove Musiche (The New Music) of 1602, in which Caccini exemplified the new style of monody, or solo song. Caccini, who believed that music should closely follow the text, fills his airs with such expressive ornamental devices as the “esclamazione” (a descrescendo on the attack of a pitch, followed by a crescendo), the “trillo” (repeated pitches which quicken in pace throughout the ornament), the “gruppo” (resembling what is now understood as a trill), and the “cascata” (a quick, scalewise descent between two pitches). Caccini alternates between syllabic (one syllable per one note) text-setting and the encrustation of a word or syllable with elaborate passagework (passaggi), the balance between the two finely-calibrated. The text of “Amarilli mia bella,” written either by the famous poet Giovanni Battista Guarini or his uncle Alessandro Guarini, is a plea to the archetypal pastoral sweetheart to believe in the depth of the persona’s love. Should she doubt it, she is invited, somewhat gruesomely, to carve open his chest with an arrow (borrowed from Cupid, no doubt) so that she might see her name engraved on his heart. In the sinuous curve of the initial phrase, dipping downwards by stages from the awestruck exhalation on the first syllable of the beloved’s name, one hears the essence of this composer’s art at its highest power, and the heightened expressivity does not slacken thereafter. Caccini twice bids the singer repeat the threefold invocation of the name “Amarilli” to figures that rise in a simulacrum of rising passion, the intensity all the greater for the economy of means.

Finally, we end this group with a work by Girolamo Frescobaldi, most famed for his keyboard music but prolific in vocal genres as well. “Così mi disprezzate” (“Do You Scorn Me Like This”) comes from a collection of “arias” or airs published during the composer’s brief stay in his old age in Florence (1628–34); both before and after this period, he worked as the organist at St. Peter’s in Rome. This particular air is an early instance of the Baroque variation passacaglia, that is, a set of variations built over a bass line, usually in triple meter, usually in minor. This sophisticated specimen actually presents a selection of different bass melodies associated with the passacaglia pattern; the challenge of all such compositions over a ground bass is to devise sinuous and ever-changing melodies over that which does not change or is strictly scripted, and Frescobaldi does so with panache and intensity in this lover’s lament.


REYNALDO HAHN “Á Chloris,” “Quand je fus pris au pavillon,” “Chanson au bord d’une fontaine,” “Paysage”
Born August 9, 1874, in Caracas, Venezuela; died January 28, 1947, in Paris, France.

The Caracas-born, half-German Jewish, half-Venezuelan composer Reynaldo Hahn was among the most elegant denizens of belle époque Paris. A protégé of Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet, he became first the lover, then the lifelong friend of Marcel Proust; Hahn was the only person allowed into the great writer’s cork-lined inner sanctum without being announced by the housekeeper-protectress Céleste. He was never comfortable in the 20th century, with its mechanized carnage, and in his two song anthologies, he looks back at bygone times with nostalgia. “Á Chloris” (“To Chloris”) is one of his loveliest such achievements, a song built over the Baroque “walking bass” from Bach’s Air on a G String—but this is transformation, not imitation, Hahn, not Bach. The late 16th- / early 17th-century poet Théophile de Viau was persecuted into an early grave for his bisexuality, and the largely closeted Hahn was, one guesses, attracted to this elegant, reticent love poem—Chloris is one of the nymphs beloved of many shepherds in classical idylls—in part for reasons of empathy. It is characteristic of this composer to write what could well be an independent piece for piano and then weave a vocal overlay throughout to form a quintessentially graceful tapestry, with an undertow of melancholy. For “Quand je fus pris au pavillon” (“When I Was Lured to Her Love Nest”) to a poem by the 15th-century poet Charles, Duke of Orléans (a royal pawn in the Hundred Years’ War, he was captured at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and held in English prisons until 1440), Hahn matches a late medieval poem with an imitation-archaic musical style, another instance in which the principal melody is in the piano and the voice is a quasi-descant, blossoming on occasion into greater exuberance. “Chanson au bord de la fontaine” (“Song on the Edge of the Fountain”), a setting of a “légende marine” (sea legend) by Maurice Magre, is a haunted and haunting song; its persona is beset with a “calm despair” whose mysterious origin is not solved for us in this extract. With its wide-open chords in the left hand and its restrained vocal line either wreathed around a single sustained tone in the right hand or floating above a low bass fundament, this is a unique sound-world in Hahn’s oeuvre. “Paysage” (“A Landscape”), dedicated “to my master, Jules Massenet,” is an evocation of past love in the Breton countryside, on the shores of a “murmuring sea” whose bass bourdon sounds softly in the left hand at the beginning and swells to a mighty crescendo at song’s end. There is a magical shift to another place in the mind, another harmonic location, when the persona invokes the oak trees ringed around a fountain and the spring waters that bubble into the high treble register.


GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL “Cara sposa, amante cara,” from Rinaldo; “Furibondo spira il vento,” from Partenope
Born February 23, 1685, in Halle; died April 14, 1759, in London.

For the second half of the program, we cross the Channel to England and remain there for the duration. Rinaldo was Handel’s first opera composed for London, specifically for the Queen’s Theater in the Haymarket; it was, not surprisingly, a “hit” of the first magnitude, although Addison and Steele tried to ridicule it in The Spectator. The title character Rinaldo in this, one of Handel’s great trilogy of magic operas from the composer’s early years in London (Amadigi and Teseo are the others) sings “Cara sposa, amante cara” (“My Dear Betrothed, My Dear Love”) in Act 1, Scene 7, just after his beloved Almirena has been carried away in a magical, monster-filled black cloud by the pagan sorceress Armida. Once again, Handel proves his consummate mastery at making the da capo aria (an initial section, a contrasting middle section, and an ornamented repetition of the first section) endemic in serious operas of the period work to greatest dramatic effect. The horrified Rinaldo—a Christian knight in the service of the historical Godfrey of Bouillon, here storming the Holy Land in the First Crusade—first grieves Almirena’s disappearance in an exquisitely austere lament: “Where are you? Return to me,” he sings over and over again. For the contrasting middle section, he breaks out in a momentary fit of rage, first in the brighter relative major key and then in minor mode. Even the dimensions of this aria engage our sympathies for the character: the grieving initial section is much longer than the brief fit of fury in the middle. Partenope was composed 29 years later, in the early days of Handel’s second opera company (the King’s Theatre) for London. Unlike Rinaldo, it was not a “hit,” perhaps because Handel was experimenting with something new in his playbook: ironic comedy rather than opera seria (serious opera, tragic or heroic or both), a psychological study of relations between the sexes largely from the woman’s point of view. (It was briefly successful in Germany, however.) The title character Partenope, who in this fiction has founded Naples, is being wooed by three suitors: Armindo (a travesti mezzo), Emilio (tenor), and Arsace (castrato). It is the latter who sings the stormy metereological aria, “Furibondo spira il vento” (“As the Wind Whistles Furiously”), at the end of Act 2 when he is rejected again by his beloved Rosmira; he was in love with her originally and then transferred his affections temporarily to Partenope. In the lieto fine (happy ending) necessary for all comedy, whatever the suffering en route, Partenope restores Rosmira to Arsace and takes Armindo as her husband.


ROGER QUILTER “Music When Soft Voices Die”
Born November 1, 1877, in Hove; died September 21, 1953, in London.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS “Linden Lea”
Born October 12, 1872, in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire; died August 26, 1958, in London.
SIR EDWARD ELGAR “Where Corals Lie”
Born June 2, 1857, in Broadheath, near Worcester; died February 23, 1934, in Worcester.
HERBERT HOWELLS “King David”
Born October 17, 1892, in Lydney, Glos.; died February 23, 1983, in London.
ARRANGED BY ROGER QUILTER “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes”
PETER WARLOCK “Yarmouth Fair”
Born October 30, 1894, in London; died December 17, 1930, in London.

Roger Quilter came into his own as a song composer at a time when English song was at low ebb in its history. In his hands, the parlor ballad is transformed into something more refined, with Shakespeare and Shelley, Robert Herrick and William Blake rubbing shoulders with more rubbishy poets in his oeuvre. “Music, When Soft Voices Die”—a paean to the lovely afterlives of all beautiful things in memory—is typical of Quilter’s art: an accompaniment in constant gentle motion on which a consummately lyrical vocal line can float and intertwine. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote songs throughout his long career, from age 10 to age 85. “Linden Lea” is an early song, a folk song–like creation ironically composed just before he discovered true English folk song. Edward Elgar was not at ease in the domain of song composition or at the piano, but in the cycle Sea Pictures, he created a landmark of English Romantic song. Set for contralto and full-size orchestra in 1899, it is a setting of five poems with sea themes by a motley crew of poets, including Elgar’s wife and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Where Corals Lie” is perhaps the most popular song of the group, a setting of a South Seas fantasy by a minor poet—but Elgar’s lovely melody in minor mode, yearning towards major, makes it memorable. The Gloucestershire composer Herbert Howells only composed 40 or so songs, which is to be regretted. He was particularly drawn to the poetry of Walter de la Mare (nearly half his output); the two men were lifelong friends and lived in similar realms of shadow, night, and dreams. Howells himself said, “I’m prouder to have written ‘King David’ than almost anything else of mine,” adding that de la Mare did not want anyone else to set it to music. “King David,” its rich harmonies shot through with speaking silences, tells of the rivalry between Art (King David’s harpist) and Nature (the nightingale that sings to ease the monarch’s melancholy).

With “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” we return to Quilter for a setting of Ben Jonson’s “To Celia”; the melody is familiar (if not its original creator, a “Colonel Mellish”), and Quilter provided it with this sweetly mellifluous setting—composed two years after the end of World War II. One would never know it from this music, a monument to Edwardian drawing rooms long gone. Philip Heseltine, also known as Peter Warlock, led a brief, brilliant life (D. H. Lawrence fashioned him into the obnoxious Halliday in Women in Love), including the composition of over 100 original songs and the editing of many Elizabethan and Jacobean lute songs (a foremost influence on his own compositions). “Yarmouth Fair,” dating from the early days of his move from Wales to Chelsea in 1824, has an odd history in several stages. The melody was composed by John Drinkwater, a road repairman in Norfolk, to words he found in an old magazine from 1896. Another British song composer, E. J. Moeran, had collected Drinkwater’s tune on a folk song expedition, and Warlock then arranged a piano accompaniment for it, but the publishers of the original words refused permission for their use. Warlock’s close friend and factotum, Hal Collins, wrote a new text for Drinkwater + Warlock, and that is what we now know. Warlock wrote very few narrative ballads, and this irresistibly merry specimen is one of them: from first encounter to successful courtship, all spurred on by a chorus of avian commentary. For all the fact that this is a setting of a preexisting melody, Warlock’s idiosyncratic tonal language is evident here, spicier, more dissonant than most of his contemporaries.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens is author of several books on song, including Schubert’s Late
Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Hugo
Wolf and His Mörike Songs (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

David Daniels, Countertenor
David Daniels is known for his superlative artistry, magnetic stage presence, and a voice of singular warmth and surpassing beauty, which have helped him redefine his voice category for the modern public. The American countertenor has appeared with the world’s major opera companies and on its main concert and recital stages. He made history as the first countertenor to give a solo recital at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage. Gramophone magazine recently acknowledged his contribution to recorded excellence as well as his expansion of the repertoire for his voice type by naming him one of the “Top Ten Trailblazers” in classical music today.

In the 2007–08 season, Mr. Daniels returns to Lyric Opera of Chicago in the title role of Giulio Cesare in the acclaimed David McVicar production conducted by Emanuelle Haïm. He sings a new production of Handel’s Tamerlano at the Bayerische Staatsoper and another new production of this opera in his debut with Washington National Opera, the latter opposite Plácido Domingo. He makes his Santa Fe Opera and role debut in a new production of Radamisto with frequent colleagues Harry Bicket and David Alden. He also appears in recital with pianist Martin Katz in Santa Barbara, CA; on the Celebrity Series of Boston; and at Cal Performances Berkeley, the University of Richmond, Spivey Hall, and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

Last season Mr. Daniels performed Giulio Cesare to great acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera (under Bicket) and at the Glyndebourne Festival (under Haim). At the Met he also portrayed Orfeo in a new Mark Morris production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice conducted by James Levine. Mr. Daniels returned to the Los Angeles Opera as Ottone in Monterverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea opposite Susan Graham. In concert, Mr. Daniels made his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker, performing Bach’s B-Minor Mass; performed solo arias with the Saint Louis and Seattle Symphonies; and toured various European cities with the Le Point du Jour ensemble.

Highlights of recent seasons include David Daniels reprising his portrayal of Bertarido in Handel’s Rodelinda at the San Francisco Opera, which won critical acclaim and thrilled audiences at the Metropolitan Opera; his role debut as Orfeo in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Robert Carsen production; and his first performances in the title role of Handel’s Orlando at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. Mr. Daniels also toured Europe with the Basel Chamber Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, and made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut under conductor Bernard Labadie.

Mr. Daniels has won admiration for his performances of extensive concert and art-song repertoire, including song literature of the 19th and 20th centuries not usually associated with his voice type. Mr. Daniels has given recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall; New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center; Munich’s Prinzregententheater; Vienna’s Konzerthaus; and Barcelona’s Teatre del Liceu; as well as at the Edinburgh, Tanglewood and Ravinia festivals.

Mr. Daniels has impressed audiences with his interpretation of an array of Handelian heroes, including Giulio Cesare. He has sung Arsace in the comedy Partenope at Lyric Opera of Chicago; the title role in Tamerlano; Arsamene in Xerxes; and two roles at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera, where he is a company favorite: David in Saul and the title role in Rinaldo. Other notable Baroque credits include Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at Covent Garden. Mr. Daniels has also performed as Oberon in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Metropolitan Opera.

Mr. Daniels is an exclusive Virgin Classics recording artist, with several critically acclaimed and best-selling solo albums to his credit. His latest critically applauded release was of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as well as solo works by the composer in a disc with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and conductor Fabio Biondi. Past years’ releases include A Quiet Thing (with guitarist Craig Ogden) and a recording of Handel’s Rinaldo on the Decca label, in which he sang the title role opposite Cecilia Bartoli, and which received a Gramophone Editor’s Choice Album of the Year award in 2002.

Honored by the music world for his unique achievements, Mr. Daniels has been the recipient of two of classical music’s most significant awards: Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year for 1999 and the 1997 Richard Tucker Award.

David Daniels was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the son of two singing teachers. He earned an undergraduate degree from the Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music. He made the daring switch to the countertenor range during graduate studies at the University of Michigan with George Shirley.

Martin Katz, Piano
Among the world’s busiest collaborators, Martin Katz has been in constant demand by the world’s most celebrated vocal soloists for more than 35 years. In addition to Mr. Daniels, he has appeared and recorded regularly with Marilyn Horne, Frederica von Stade, Karita Mattila, José Carreras, Cecilia Bartoli, Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathleen Battle, Samuel Ramey, and Lawrence Brownlee, to name just a few. Season after season, the world’s musical capitals figure prominently in his schedule. Throughout his long career he has been fortunate to partner some of the world’s most esteemed voices in recitals on five continents.

Mr. Katz is a native of Los Angeles, where he began piano studies at the age of five. He attended the University of Southern California as a scholarship student and studied the specialized field of accompanying with its pioneer teacher, Gwendolyn Koldofsky. While still a student, he was given the unique opportunity of accompanying the master classes and lessons of such luminaries as Lotte Lehmann, Jascha Heifetz, Pierre Bernac, and Gregor Piatigorsky. Following his formal education, he held the position of pianist for the US Army Chorus in Washington, D.C. for three years, before moving to New York where his busy international career began in earnest in 1969.

In more recent years, invitations to conduct orchestral evenings have come with increasing frequency. Mr. Katz has partnered several of his soloists on the podium for orchestras of the BBC, Houston, Miami, New Haven, Tokyo, and Washington, DC. His editions of works by Handel and Rossini have been presented by the Metropolitan, Houston Grand Opera, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. He has also been pleased to conduct several staged productions for the University of Michigan’s Opera Theater, San Francisco’s Merola Program and the Music Academy of the West.

Finally, the professional profile of Martin Katz is completed by his commitment to teaching. Since 1984, Ann Arbor, Michigan has been his home, where he has been happy to chair the School of Music’s program in collaborative piano and play an active part in operatic productions. He has been a pivotal figure in the training of countless young artists, both singers and pianists, who are working all over the world. The University has recognized this important work, making him the first Arthur Schnabel Professor of Music. His teaching outside Michigan includes regular guest appearance at the National Theatre in Tokyo, San Francisco Opera, GuildHall School in London, and The Santa Fe Opera.