Thomas Patrick Hughes, Baritone Senior Recital Esther Rayo, Soprano Mary Katherine Vom Lehn, Mezzo-Soprano Daniel Alexander O’Hearn, Tenor Luciano Laurentiu, Piano
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Friday, June 2, 2017 • 9:00 p.m Thomas Patrick Hughes Senior Recital DePaul Recital Hall 804 West Belden Avenue • Chicago Friday, June 2, 2017 • 9:00 p.m. DePaul Recital Hall Thomas Patrick Hughes, baritone Senior Recital Esther Rayo, soprano Mary Katherine vom Lehn, mezzo-soprano Daniel Alexander O’Hearn, tenor Luciano Laurentiu, piano PROGRAM Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (1896) Denn es gehet dem Menschen Ich wandte mich O tod, wie bitter bist du Wenn ich mich Menschen Luciano Laurentiu, piano Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Lydia, Op. 4 (1870) Clair de Lune, Op. 46 (1887) Luciano Laurentiu, piano Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) “Hai gia vinta la causa!” Luciano Laurentiu, piano Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 Program Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Spanisches Liederspiel, Op. 74 V. Es ist verrathen IX. Ich bin geliebt Luciano Laurentiu, piano Esther Rayo, soprano Mary Katherine vom Lehn, mezzo-soprano Daniel Alexander O’Hearn, tenor Intermission Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 Program John Dowland (1563-1626) Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite (1597) Henry Purcell (1659-1695) The Faerie Queene (1692) “Now, winter comes slowly” W.S. Gwynn Williams (1896-1978) My Little Welsh Home (1950) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) The Sky Above The Roof (1908) Gerald Finzi (1901-1956) Let Us Garlands Bring, Op. 18 (1942) No. V It was a Lover and his Lass Arr. Granville Bantock (1868-1946) Ar hyd y nos (1784) Arr. Helen Hopekirk (1856-1945) By Yon Bonnie Banks (1841) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), arranger Folksong Arrangements, Volume 5 (1951) V. Ca’ the yowes Roger Quilter (1877-1953) Five Shakespeare Songs, Op. 23, No. 4 Take, O take those lips away John Bull (1562-1628) National & Royal Anthem: God Save the Queen (1619) Thomas Arne (1710-1778) Rule, Britannia! (1740) Luciano Laurentiu, piano Thomas Patrick Hughes is from the studio of Elizabeth Byrne. This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of the degree Bachelor of Music. As a courtesy to those around you, please silence all cell phones and other electronic devices. Flash photography is not permitted. Thank you. Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (1896) Duration: 18 minutes Johannes Brahms referred to the Vier ernste Gesänge, for low voice and piano, as a present he made for himself for his birthday. He completed the cycle on 7 May, 1896, for his sixty-third, and last, birthday. Brahms began the pieces after Clara Schumann (his lifelong friend and widow of Robert Schumann) suffered a stroke on 26 March. Although she managed to write a brief note to Brahms on his birthday, she never recovered and died on the th 20 of May. Brahms played and sang these at a gathering of friends after her burial. Passages of the Vier ernste Gesänge are reminiscent of the Symphony No. 4. He dedicated the cycle to his friend, Max Klinger. During 1897 and 1898, the Vier ernste Gesänge were often presented in memory of Brahms and were sung in this fashion throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Holland. Brahms pulled the text of the Vier ernste Gesänge from Biblical sources, two from the book of Ecclesiastes, one from Corinthians I and one from the book of Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha (non-canonised doctrine within the Christian faith). The texts of the first three songs deal with death, the transience of life and the oppression. The text of the fourth song is taken from the Apocrypha and is focused on faith, hope, charity, and love. Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Lydia, Op. 4 (1870) & Clair de Lune, Op. 46 (1887) Duration: 5 minutes Faure is widely regarded as one of the masters of French Art song, or Melodie. In 1922, Maurice Ravel wrote that Faure had even saved French Music from the dominance of German Lieder. Two years later the critic Samuel Langford wrote of Fauré, "More surely almost than any writer in the world he commanded the faculty to create a song all of a piece, and with a sustained intensity of mood which made it like a single thought". Faure’s Op. 4 and Op. 46 display his mastery of Melodie during his Early and Middle periods respectively. Although his earlier works are seen as simple, it is in that simplicity that we see the genius that was Faure when it came to setting text. Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 Program Notes Faure has long been criticized for sullying his otherwise esteemed body of art songs with settings of poems by inferior authors. His settings of Verlaine, for example, are among his most beloved. But other poems, such as that used in Lydia, the second song for voice and piano from Faure Op. 2, are regarded more coolly in academic circles. This, of course, unfairly projects modern tastes onto fin de siècle culture, and at any rate fails to address the innovations and seminal stylistic characteristics that this early song exhibits. The text, taken from Leconte de Lisle, plays on the ageless European literary conceit of using "death" or "dying" as a euphemism for the erotic. The poet hardly casts the image as a metaphor, describing a "death" imposed by the physical beauty of the beloved. Faure, on the other hand, paces the dramatic curve of the song, with its hushed repeated chords and chromatic chord progressions growing more intense as the singer's melody arches ever higher. The song, of course, reaches its zenith at the moment of death: "Oh Lydia, return my life to me/That I might die, die forever." Faure’s biographers and others, recognizing the composer's penchant for self-borrowing, have traced the vocal melody of Lydia, with its stepwise ascents and descents and subsequent scalar figure that together chart an underlying upward incline, through nearly four decades of Faure’s oeuvre: first in "La lune blanche" from La bonne chanson (1893), then Act III of Prométhée (1900), and finally, the Kyrie from Messe basse (1906). Scholar Carlo Caballero, for example, traces Faure’s frequent use of the sharped-fourth scale degree or (appropriately enough) Lydian mode to this early song. These borrowings beg no particular cross-readings or intertextual connections, but, intentionally explicit or not, rather point up the general stylistic consistency one finds throughout Faure’s work, beginning with these early songs. Clair de lune represents Faure’s first excursion into the ideal landscape to which he would return several times as a supreme master of the Melodie -- notably, in the Mélodies de Venise, Op. 58 (1891), La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1892-1894), and the fantastic divertissement Masques et bergamasques, Op. 112 (1919), in which Clair de lune would find its predestined place. By contrast, Debussy’s second, more successful setting of Clair de lune, from his first collection of Fêtes galantes (1891), perhaps protests too much in sensuous striving to evoke a realm which Faure calls up persuasively in a subtle, deceptively simple fait accompli. Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 Program Notes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) Duration: 5 minutes When it comes to musical geniuses, no name comes to mind before that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Born into a musical family, he started showing savant-like prowess at the age of five when he was already composing, playing keyboard and violin, and performing for European royalty. As Mozart aged, his compositions became more sophisticated; his Opera’s more scandalous and intellectually challenging. Much like the Age of Enlightenment that was going on around him, Mozart began questioning the aristocracy. The perfect example is in his Opera, Le Nozze di Figaro. Based on the play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro written by Pierre Beaumarchais, the play's denunciation of aristocratic privilege has been characterised as foreshadowing the French Revolution. The revolutionary leader Georges Danton said that the play "killed off the nobility"; in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte called it "the Revolution already put into action." The second story within the Trilogy, Le Nozze di Figaro picks up three years following the end of The Barber of Seville as Figaro is engaged to Susanna; both characters are among the Count's staff in his dwelling. In the three years since Figaro helped forge the marriage of the Count and Rosina, the Count has already grown bored with his marriage and is taking notice of Suzanna. The Count looks to re-engage the act of primae noctis (the first night, in which he would consummate the marriage with the bride-to-be prior to Figaro's honeymoon). In Hai gia vinta la causa, the Count overhears Susanna and Figaro saying “We have won our case” and determines that he will not be undermined. Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Spanisches Liederspiel, Op. 74 Duration: 6 minutes Schumann often experimented with new forms of music drama, such as his Scenes from Goethe's Faust, WoO 3, the choral ballads that resemble oratorios or even mini-operas, declamations such as Schön Hedwig, and his secular oratorio Paradise and the Peri. In this work, one of his earliest such experiments, he wrote a liederspiel -- a combination of song cycle (Liederkreis) and singspiel -- in which the poems are organized to create a Thomas Patrick Hughes • June 2, 2017 Program Notes semblance of a plot (Schumann also added titles to some of them to further this) and the different singers take on roles. Whereas traditional nineteenth century liederspiels were bourgeois entertainments, inserting simple songs into dramatic works and plays, Schumann's effort eliminates all elements of scenery, action, and dialogue, and so for all practical purposes amounts to a song cycle.