Sunday, November 24 // Door at 7 PM // Show at 7:30 PM // $30 GA // $10 for Students
Conceived as a journey into the cold of winter, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise sets to music a selection of poems by Wilhelm Müller: Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn-Player. Fluidly drifting between the world of dreams and bitter reality, the wanderer is heard in conversation with their own heart, by turns reflective, questioning, ironic, and finally resigned. Schubert’s achievement in setting these poems is to give musical life to the wanderer’s symbolic companions – the sun, wind, trees and leaves, flowers, rivers and snow, crows and ravens – not only in the contours of the singer’s melody, but especially in the pictorial vividness of the piano score.
Our first concert of the season, Dreams of Winterreise, will feature works inspired by Schubert’s beloved masterpiece.
December Songs by Maury Yeston (composer of Tony Award-winning “Nine”) is a retelling of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise with a cabaret sensibility. Where the Schubert masterpiece features Müller’s poems portraying a jilted young man’s wandering the snows of the Vienna woods and ultimately sinking into madness, the Yeston lyrics depict a contemporary young woman wandering a snowy Central Park in New York City and finding recovery and hope on her journey.
Composer Jay Schwartz was especially bold in his reworking of Winterreise. Schubert’s vocal melody remains intact while the saxophone ensemble assumes the emotional burden of the wanderer’s inner turmoil.
Schwartz’s music has been described as “us[ing]the overtone spectrum, microtonality, and glissandi in a poetic context with a captivating sensuous drawing power and an unabashed emotional disposition.” The result is a captivating and wholly immersive take on Winterreise.
Concert Program:
Selections from Winterreise by Franz Schubert
Selections from Winterreise by Jay Schwartz
Selections from December Songs by Maury Yeston
Caitlin Cisler (soprano), Jan Halmes (piano), Jesse Dochnahl, Johan Eriksson, Brooke Florence, Owen Kirby, Lewis Nelson, and Jared Supola (saxophones)
