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Dickinson College: Musical Artists in Residence
Florestan will present four concerts in Rubendall Recital Hall this year, each of which will be preceded by a week of residency activities led by Florestan’s Co-Artistic Directors and numerous guest artists. We will kick off the residency with a performance of Ned Rorem’s compelling evening-length song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen. This groundbreaking example of vocal chamber music is a seamless combination of solos, duets, trios, and quartets for employing singers and a pianist. Rorem is a composer with a profound appreciation of poetry, and this cycle features a wondrous collection of poems by poets such as Walt Whitman, Paul Goodman, Oscar Wilde, Colette, and W. H. Auden. Florestan’s artists for this event will be baritone Aaron Engebreth, soprano Martha Guth, tenor Joe Dan Harper, mezzo-soprano Lynne McMurtry, and pianist Alison d’Amato. Florestan will present three other concerts at Dickinson College during the 2007-2008 academic year, drawn from our current two-year exploration of songs of the British Isles. On November 2, 2007, we will present Let Us Garlands Bring: Songs of Shakespeare, featuring settings by some of Britain’s most beloved composers—Finzi, Vaughan Williams, and Quilter, in addition to settings in German and French translation from Schubert and Chausson.
Florestan’s final concert of the year, Friday, April 4th, 7pm will explore the song settings of poet A.E. Housman. In addition to more familiar settings from A Shropshire Lad, this concert will feature the world premiere of a series of Housman settings by contemporary American composers, including Ned Rorem. Our goal at Dickinson, and in all of our activities, is to welcome both performers and listeners into the compelling world of song, fostering a spirit of curiosity and engagement with the vast and multicultural experiences it contains. In addition to these concerts, the Florestan Recital Project will present a variety of residency activities for the coming year. We hope to engage and involve all departments throughout Dickinson College as well as the Carlisle community, taking song performance as a point of departure for discussions about the poetry, socio-historic contexts, and collaborations involved in song and vocal chamber repertoire. Click here for more information. |
As the Artistic Co-Directors of Florestan Recital Project, we are thrilled to begin the position of Musical Artists in Residence at Dickinson College this fall. Florestan is one of the few organizations in North America championing the art of the song recital. The rich tradition of liberal arts scholarship and interdisciplinary activities at Dickinson makes it an ideal environment in which to explore art song repertoire. Song is an interdisciplinary art form, a fusion of poetry and music, created for a singer and pianist’s collaboration. Florestan presents recitals that explore and expand the canon to the fullest extent possible, drawing connections between composers and their times from early music to the present day. In addition to maintaining an active concert series, we are committed to working with musicians on creating new approaches to chamber music collaborations in colleges and conservatories. 
In January 2008, Florestan will celebrate Robbie Burns Day with a program of Scottish music and poetry. The Scottish poet Robert Burns was not only a composer himself, but he also inspired a wide range of song settings by composers such as Robert and Clara Schumann, Beethoven, and Benjamin Britten. This program is an opportunity to hear these varied interpretations of Burns’s work, beautiful strains of Scottish folk songs, Lady Macbeth’s mad scene set to song, and living composer Judith Weir’s compelling one-woman opera King Harald’s Saga.