Benjamin Liupaogo

Saturday, April 8, 2017 • 8:00 p.m Benjamin Liupaogo Certificate Recital DePaul Concert Hall 800 West Belden Avenue • Chicago Saturday, April 8, 2017 • 8:00 p.m. DePaul Concert Hall Benjamin Liupaogo, tenor Nicholas Hutchinson, piano Certificate Recital PROGRAM Joseph Marx (1882-1964) Sommerlied Selige Nacht Waldseligkeit Hat dich die Liebe berührt Henri Duparc (1848-1933) Chanson Triste Extase Phidylè Intermission Benjamin Moore (1960) Dear Theo (2014) The Red Vineyard I Found a Woman Little One The Man I Have to Paint When I’m at Work Already Broken Souvenir Benjamin Liupaogo • April 8, 2017 Paolo Tosti (1846-1916) La Serenata Ideale L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra Arturo Buzzi-Peccia (1854-1943) Lolita Ernesto de Curtis (1860-1926) Torna a Surriento Benjamin Liupaogo is from the studio of Elizabeth Byrne. This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of the degree Certificate in Performance. As a courtesy to those around you, please silence all cell phones and other electronic devices. Flash photography is not permitted. Thank you. Benjamin Liupaogo • April 8, 2017 PROGRAM NOTES Joseph Marx (1882-1964) Duration: 10 minutes Austrian composer Joseph Marx is known primarily for his songs; he composed around 120 between 1908 and 1912, with more to follow in later years. His style is a mixture of late Romanticism and Impressionism, with debts to Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Max Reger, among others. If his songs seem eclectic, it is because he adapted his musical language to each poem he set to music. In addition to composing, Marx worked as a music theory teacher, director of Vienna's music academy (the Hochschule für Musik) in the 1920s, a music critic for two Viennese periodicals, and a writer. A conservative, he makes no mention of his more radical contemporaries, including Schoenberg, Berg, and Hindemith, in his 1964 book Weltsprache Musik (The World Language of Music). Sommerlied is an enjoyable swirl of exuberance. It showcases happiness, joy and sunshine. In Selige Nacht ("Blessed Night"), two lovers lie in bed, rapt in post-coital bliss, while hand-crossing figures in the piano keep the love flowing; the hand-crossing was perhaps inspired by the initial words of the song, "in the beloved's arms," as this motion mimics an embrace. The rich, warm blaze of C major at the "scent of roses" is one notable moment of high Romanticism in this song. Otto Erich Hartleben, the poet of this love song, translated the original French texts of Arnold Schoenberg's famous cycle Pierrot lunaire. In Waldseligkeit, turn-of-century German poet Richard Dehmel features three Romantic themes: the German forest (a nationalist symbol), solitude, and thoughts of the beloved. Marx creates gentle treetop rustling in the piano’s right-hand part, while the singer and the left-hand melody form a lyrical duet. While so many lieder deal with anguish and regret, 1908’s Hat dich die Liebe berührt ("If love has touched you softly") is a song of radiant joy, even quiet triumph, the singer fully confident he has received the most important gift life has to offer. It praises love as the crowning glory of life; the song is set to words by Paul Heyse, whose paraphrases of Spanish and Italian folk poetry were set to music Benjamin Liupaogo • April 8, 2017 Program Notes by Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf. This song is a perfect display of Marx’s late Romantic, lush sound world. Henri Duparc (1848-1933) Duration: 12 minutes The long-lived Henri Duparc composed only seventeen melodies before falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenic disease that prevented him from composing anything at all in the final forty-eight years of his long life. As if in compensation for such a hideous fate, his songs are among the greatest in the French language, their subtlety and gravitas beyond the reach of most of his contemporaries. Under the aegis of those German composers he revered (Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner), he fashioned songs that are inimitably French, marked by a particularly complex relationship between music and words of a sort that would not be equaled until Fauré’s mature songs. The beautiful Chanson Triste might induce a lump in the throats of all who recall Duparc’s fate when they hear this limpid hymn to love’s powers of healing . perhaps. It is the touch of doubt that puts the “tristesse” (sadness) in “Chanson triste.” Throughout this song, we traverse one key after another in an ambitious, beautifully crafted tonal design with effortless ease, as if on a voyage through all of love’s benefices. Extase, set to another poem by the minor poet Henri Cazalis, bears the traces of wagnérisme, or Wagner’s influence on French composers, in its harmonies, quasi-orchestral texture, and love-death nexus. “The eroticism of this song has – like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – a spiritual dimension.” (Susan Youens) The half-Creole, half-French poet Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle founded the Parnassian school of poetry, whose adherents reacted against Romanticism by writing poems that combine chiseled forms, a coolly objective tone, and locations exotic both in time and place. From Leconte de Lisle’s Études latines (Latin Studies), Duparc plucked Phydilé for one of his last and loveliest songs, dedicated to his fellow composer Ernest Chausson. “At the start, refined sensuality is evoked by limited motion to neighboring harmonies; from there, ravishment proceeds apace. Benjamin Liupaogo • April 8, 2017 Program Notes By the time the musical persona has bid his beloved to “Repose” (Rest) three times in succession, we are, in Graham Johnson’s words, “putty in Duparc’s hands.” (Susan Youens) Benjamin Moore (1960) Dear Theo Duration: 16 minutes Vincent Van Gogh and His Brother Theo Little appreciated during his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and a vital contributor to the development of modern art. His brother Theo ran a successful art gallery in Paris and provided unfailing financial support to Vincent throughout his career, allowing him to devote himself entirely to painting. Their lifelong friendship is recorded in the hundreds of letters they exchanged from August 1872 until July 1890, and is the source for most of what is known about the thoughts and beliefs of the artist. Benjamin Moore is a painter himself. He has been moved and inspired by van Gogh’s work since early childhood. Benjamin Moore also believes that whether one is an artist, a musician, or an appreciator of art, one cannot help but feel a connection to this man who, through great financial and personal hardship, maintained a passion for his work and for life in general. This cycle, Dear Theo, for tenor voice and piano is a setting of selected passages from the letters that Moore adapted from the original English translation (translated from their original French or Dutch) which express, in the letters, major emotional themes that run throughout the correspondence. In these seven songs Moore tried particularly to emphasize the poignant fact that Vincent would never know the tremendous value and influence his art would eventually achieve, and how, for instance, in August of 1883 he could write that what he wanted was to leave ‘a souvenir’ to express the depth of his feeling. The words to the first song are based on letters from 1888. Other passages were based on or adapted from letters dated April ’88, July ’82, December ’81, August ’83 and August ’87. It should be noted that in certain cases, Benjamin Moore modified the translations and repeated certain words or phrases to allow for a more regular musical structure. In each case Moore strived to maintain the spirit and intention of van Gogh’s original words. Benjamin Liupaogo • April 8, 2017 Program Notes *The texts are based on or adapted from the first English translation of letters written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo entitled The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Constable, 1927). A majority of the letters in the collection were translated by Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who died in 1925. Paolo Tosti (1846-1916) Arturo Peccia-Buzzo (1854-1943) Ernesto De Curtis (1875-1937) Duration: 19 minutes Neopolitan Songs In the broadest terms, the genre of Canzoni Napoletana, or Neapolitan songs, consists of a large body of popular vocal music, with the distinguishing feature of having texts in the Southern Italian dialect centering around Naples. The genre became firmly established during the 1830s as the result of an annual songwriting competition in Naples, but there are songs in the dialect dating back perhaps into the 1100s. Although the competition ceased as an annual event in 1950, there are still a few singer-songwriters who carry on the tradition. In the early part of the 20th Century, the famous tenor Enrico Caruso popularized them in the U.S. and elsewhere by singing them as encore pieces, and decades later "The Three Tenors" (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras) helped keep them in our collective consciousness. As with the majority of popular songs, regardless of the language, most Neapolitan songs are about love, either lamenting unrequited or lost love, or joyously celebrating it. Sir Francesco Paolo Tosti was an Italian composer and music teacher. Tosti received most of his music education in his native Ortona, Italy, as well as at the conservatory in Naples. After an initial career as singer and voice teacher, he became restless during his twenties, and in 1875, visited London, England, eventually settling down in the city. In 1880, he was made singing master to the Royal Family and in 1894 he joined the Royal Academy of Music as a professor.

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