Serenata is a program all about the art song featuring music for (usually) solo voice with (usually) piano accompaniment, but there are always exceptions! It's a thirty-minute program airing Saturdays at 1 p.m. from late May to early December on Classical 101. I began Serenata fifteen years ago and our repertoire over the years has run from Monteverdi madrigals to Byzantine Chant and George Crumb's magnificent Ancient Voices of Children. Today we are all about 'more is better.' "Art song" is intimate by definition. (If you want glorious excess, I have an opera show immediately following at 1:30 p.m. Read more about that here). This Saturday, May 28, we'll hear excerpts from Franz Schubert's song cycle of imaginary love, Die schoene Muellerin (The Lovely Mill-Maid). It does not end well for our protagonist, but the music is sublime. Mill wheels, brooks, nature, heartbeats, breathlessness, resignation - Schubert depicts all of this in music. We are going to sample a new recording of Muellerin with the British tenor Mark Padmore, accompanied by Paul Lewis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGwlKfYmCK4 On other upcoming episodes of Serenata:
- June 4: The Songs of Darius Milhaud - Paris in the Jazz Age
- June 11: Remembering Shirley Verrett
- June 18: Â The Songs of Jake Heggie; no longer the new kid on the block, Heggie is the composer of Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick and was mentored by Frederica von Stade
- June 25: Songs of Love and Death - need I say more?
Please join me for Serenata - thirty minutes of art song - stories with music. Saturdays at 1pm on Classical 101.
