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Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: Susan Graham with Bradley Moore (May 26)

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by Daniel Hathaway

GrahamSusan Graham’s splendidly communicative recital program on the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival on Thursday evening, May 26 in Gamble Auditorium, involved slipping twenty extra songs in between the original eight of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. That resulted in a rich, nuanced commentary on the composer’s chronicle of a woman’s life cycle from the first glimpse of her beloved all the way through marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, ending with his demise. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: Edwin Crossley-Mercer & Jason Paul Peterson (May 24)

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by Timothy Robson

Crossley-Mercer-RecitalOn Tuesday, May 24, French baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer and pianist Jason Paul Peterson opened the 2016 edition of the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival with a recital in Gamble Auditorium. Now in its 30th year, the week-long festival, which focuses on the combination of solo singer and piano, is the brainchild of retired Cleveland Institute of Music voice professor George Vassos. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: catching up with baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer

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by Daniel Hathaway

Crossley-Mercer-RecitalBritish baritone Edwin Crossley-Mercer sang a brilliant recital in March of 2013 as an off-year event of the biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival. He returns to Berea this week to give a recital with pianist Jason Paul Peterson on Tuesday, May 24 at 8:00 pm, and to coach some of the week-long Art Song Festival’s ten singer-pianist teams in master classes on Wednesday, May 25.

Crossley-Mercer was “discovered” by Art Song Festival artistic director George Vassos through YouTube videos. The baritone spoke with us three years ago for a pre-concert interview while preparing to sing the role of Don Giovanni in Dijon. We reached him by Skype at his home in France’s Auvergne region to catch up on his recent activities and talk about his Tuesday recital. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival: a conversation with Susan Graham

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by Daniel Hathaway

GrahamOne of the most versatile mezzo-sopranos in the business, Susan Graham will visit the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival for a recital with pianist Bradley Moore on Thursday evening, May 26 in Gamble Auditorium. The recital will interleave songs from Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben with pieces by other composers ranging from Grieg, Strauss, and Tchaikovsky to Ravel, Poulenc, and Granados.

“It’s a fantastic program,” Graham said in a recent telephone conversation from San Francisco, where she was singing Berlioz’s La Mort de Cléopâtre with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. [Read more…]

Baritone Elliot Madore to be featured in BW Art Song Festival Recital

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by Daniel Hathaway

MADORE-ElliotThe biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival likes to keep the buzz alive by presenting a solo recital by an international artist every other year. On Sunday evening, March 15 at 7:00 p.m., Canadian baritone Elliot Madore will bring lieder, chansons and songs by Robert Schumann, Francis Poulenc and Charles Ives to the stage of Gamble Auditorium in Berea, in collaboration with pianist Natalia Katyukova.

At 26, Madore already has an impressive resumé. He set a record as the youngest singer to win the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions in 2010, then went on to make his Metropolitan Opera debut as Lysander in The Enchanted Island. Madore has sung the role of Don Giovanni in St. Louis, at Tanglewood under James Levine, and at the Glyndebourne Festival. In January, he sang the role of Adorio in Les Indes galantes with William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants to open the new Philharmonie Hall in Paris. [Read more…]

Review: BW Art Song Festival — baritone Andrew Garland and pianist Warren Jones (May 22)

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by Guytano Parks

GARLAND-JONESAmerican baritone Andrew Garland presented a recital dubbed “The Quest — Don Quixote and Other Wanderers, ” as the second faculty performance of the 22nd Art Song Festival in Gamble Auditorium at Baldwin Wallace University on Thursday evening, May 22.

Partnering masterfully with Warren Jones, Musical America’s “Collaborative Pianist of the Year” for 2010, Garland took us on the quest via music by Vaughan Williams, Schubert, Gabriela Lena Frank, Ravel, Steven Mark Kohn and Leigh-Darion. Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel, based on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, opened the program. The first of the nine songs, “The Vagabond”, marched along deliberately and found the team pausing slightly on the last beat of certain measures, effectively emphasizing the poetry.

Garland delivered the text with beautiful, clear diction, resonant tone and elegant phrasing, while Jones produced an exquisite array of tone colors, textures and dynamics on the piano. [Read more…]

Review: BW Art Song Festival: Edwin Crossley-Mercer makes his U.S. recital debut (March 3)

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 by Daniel Hathaway

ArtCrossley-Mercer-Recital song fans had a tough choice between two fine baritones last Sunday afternoon. Thomas Hampson’s recital on the Tuesday Musical Series, rescheduled from last Fall, went up at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron at 2:30. And Edwin Crossley-Mercer was to make his United States recital debut courtesy of the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival in Gamble Auditorium in Berea at 4:00. Alas, even the Star Trek transporter couldn’t get you to both performances. [Read more…]

Mezzo Michelle DeYoung to sing Art Song Festival concert at CMA

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by Daniel Hathaway

DeYOUNG-Michelle-250sqIt’s an off-year for the biennial Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival, but the organizers like to keep a buzz going during the hiatus. This year’s featured artist is mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, one of the most versatile singers on the international circuit. In partnership with her longtime pianist, Kevin Murphy, she’ll bring a recital of vocal music by Berlioz, Debussy, Brahms, Purcell and Mahler and a set of Spirituals to the Gartner Auditorium stage at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday evening, May 18 at 7:30 pm. She returns to Cleveland next season to sing the Verdi Requiem with The Cleveland Orchestra.

We reached the very engaging singer by telephone earlier this month at her home in the Rockies in Evergreen, Colorado, where she was enjoying a few days of rest and relaxation. (Our conversation was briefly interrupted when a pine tree her husband was felling to prevent the spread of pine beetles went the wrong way and fell on a power line — but all turned out well!) [Read more…]

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