Thursday, Sept. 16th, 2010, at 7:00 PM
JP Concerts presents [plain] song, an art song collective of singers and pianists, performing the Spanisches Liederbuch of Hugo Wolf. Featured singers are baritone Ferris Allen, mezzo-soprano Katherine Growdon, soprano Emily Quane, and baritone Jarvis Wyche. Collaborative pianists for the program are Elizabeth Avery and David Collins. Tickets are $10 general admission.
Baritone Ferris Allen has performed music from the early Baroque to the twenty-first century with such diverse ensembles as Apollo's Fire Baroque Orchestra; Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires; and Aspen Opera Theater. Notable performances in song include Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte with pianist Margo Garrett at the Aspen Music Festival, and Twin Cities performances of Schubert's Winterreise with conductor-pianist Andrew Altenbach of Minnesota Opera. In the fall of 2008, Allen and Altenbach were selected as a duo to inaugurate LiederAlive!, a new San Francisco venue that unites a young generation of Lieder performers with world-renowned artists of the genre for a series of public classes and demonstrations. Equally at home in the opera house, in January of 2008 he wo3rked alongside prolific composer William Bolcom to create what Opera News praised as his "subtle portrayal" of the mercurial Jules in Bolcom's most recent opera, A Wedding. In May he sang the role of Achis in the North American premiere of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's David et Jonathas, an American Opera Theater production for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Collaborative pianist and vocal coach Elizabeth Avery has appeared in solo and collaborative performances throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe. She has held faculty positions at Austin Peay State University, Castleton State College and the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, teaching applied piano, lyric diction, class piano and coaching singers on operatic and recital repertoire. Ms. Avery was the rehearsal pianist of the Nashville Symphony Chorus for four years, and coached the Nashville Opera's Mary Ragland Young Artist program as well as numerous university opera productions. An advocate of the works of living composers, her work with M. Zachary Johnson led to premieres of his works in New York City's Steinway Hall (2006) and Weill Recital Hall (2007).
In recent summers Ms. Avery has been invited as staff pianist for the Deutsch für Sänger program at Middlebury College's renowned German Language School. In addition to a furthering her expertise in languages and diction, she continues to research the history of operatic piano-vocal scores. Her dissertation project at the Eastman School of Music is a collection of her own piano reductions of commonly excerpted arias from the operas of Richard Strauss.
After completing the DMA in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music at the Eastman School of Music in the summer of 2009, she will join the voice faculty of Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music as Visiting Assistant Professor and Resident Scholar in Collaborative Piano. Currently a student of Jean Barr, she was honored in 2009 with the Eschenbach Prize for distinguished collaboration with singers. Her prior studies include an MM from the University of Michigan, a BM in Piano and Music Education from the Crane School of Music, and Special Studies at the Prague Conservatory while studying Czech language and lyric diction. Prior teachers include Milan Langer, Martin Katz, Sergio de los Cobos and Frank Iogha.
Pianist David Collins has appeared as a collaborator in recitals throughout New England and the Midwest. A native of Michigan, David has performed at chamber music series in Manistique and Escanaba, as well as at the Pine Mountain Music Festival. In the Boston area, he has performed at Boston University, MIT, the Boston Conservatory and at the New England Conservatory. He made his Jordan Hall debut in 2002 with the Alhambra Piano Trio.
His recent performances include recitals in Denver with soprano Emily Quane, Madison (WI) with soprano Karen Caballero, and a chamber music recital in Portland (OR) with various singers and instrumentalists. David holds a bachelors degree in composition from Western Michigan University, a masters degree in accompanying from the University of Wisconsin, and a doctorate in collaborative piano from the New England Conservatory. He recently served on the piano faculty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and before that, on the opera coaching faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he helped direct the undergraduate opera program. David spent 5 years as the pianist and assistant conductor for the MIT concert chorale, and several seasons as pianist and répétiteur for Boston Opera Collaborative. He has also worked as répétiteur for Lakes Region Opera (NH) and the Pine Mountain Music Festival (MI). In addition to his busy performing schedule, David currently maintains a private vocal coaching studio in the Boston area.
Mezzo-soprano Katherine Growdon recently moved from San Francisco to Boston, where she has had the pleasure of singing with Emmanuel Music and, to critical acclaim, as a soloist with the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Cutler Majestic Theater. Her operatic credits include Cherubino, Idamante, Nicklausse, Hansel, Meg Page, Count Orsini, and Mércèdes. This past summer she was a Tanglewood Fellow, in which she made her Boston Pops début as Charlotte in A Little Night Music. Upcoming engagements include Dido and the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas and Love Song Waltzes with the Mark Morris Dance Group.
Emily Quane, soprano, has performed roles in The Medium, The Pirates of Penzance, Hansel and Gretel, Bastien und Bastienne, Help! Help! The Globolinks, L'enfant et les sortilèges, L'Egisto, Orpheus in the Underworld, and The Soprano Monologues. Ms.Quane is an active recitalist, having performed numerous new music premiers, including the New England premier of Steve Reich's Daniel Variations, and the world premier of selections from Mohammed Fairouz's Bonsai Journal. Oratorio repertoire includes solo work in Vivaldi's Gloria, Schubert's Mass in G, and Mendelssohn's Elijah. Ms. Quane is also an educator, and recently concluded her second residency as music and stage director for the MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players. Ms. Quane spent two summers at the Middlebury College German for Singers program for which she was awarded a Max Kade stipendium. This summer she concluded a fellowship at New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at which she "gave an aristocratic account of Tan Dun's all-over-the-map Silk Road" according to the Boston Globe. She finished her Master of Music degree at the New England Conservatory and continues to study with Dr. James McDonald. Her undergraduate degree came from the University of Northern Colorado under the tutelage of Diane Bolden-Taylor.
Jarvis Wyche, baritone, is an experienced performer of both concert and operatic repertoire. Included among his extensive experience as an oratorio soloist are appearances as the soloist in Messiah, Haydn's The Creation, Bach's Magnificat and Fauré's Requiem, among others. In 2009 Mr. Wyche was a Young Artist with Ohio Light Opera. Other operatic experience includes roles as varied as Papageno and the First Priest (The Magic Flute), Zodzetrick (Scott Joplin's Treemonisha), Antonio (Le nozze di Figaro), La notte (Cavalli's L'Egisto), Vernon (Lee Hoiby's Summer and Smoke), and a leading role in the world premiere of The Edge of Glory with Juventas New Music. Jarvis received his Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from the New England Conservatory in 2009. While at the Conservatory, he pursued studies with James McDonald. A native of Richmond, Virginia, Mr. Wyche completed his Bachelor of Music at Virginia Commonwealth University.