Word: songe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Upshaw returned for slightly more modern music: Berg's Seven Early Songs, begun in the composer's twenty-first year. The music is motley, elusive stuff that manages to sound at times like Schumann and at others like Schoenberg. The poetry of the seven different poets is altogether better and fresher than the Schubert texts. Of special literary value is Rilke's text for the fourth song, "The Crown of Dreams," but the musical hair-raisers were the first ("Night") and seventh ("Summer Days"). In each, Upshaw's intonation and delivery etched certain phrases in the mind: "Gib acht" ("give...
...regular program concluded with a gorgeous performance of Schumann's Op. 39 Liederkreis, a cycle from 1840, the legendary "year of song." Working with texts by the poet and novelist Joseph Eichendorff, Schumann dashed off these twelve songs in a few weeks in May--have you finished your term papers? The duo's singing and playing shared a similar exuberance. Upshaw's fierce glares and terror-filled voice in "Waldgespruch" (Wood Dialogue) were playfully evocative of the Schubert Erlkoening, while Goode evoked the Liszt "Wild Jagd" transcendental etude when a line of Eichendorff's mentioned "ein lustiges Jagd," a merry...
...last and best-known song of the set, "Fruehlingsnacht" (Spring Night, an appropriate enough title) was the occasion for a masterful performance. Upshaw somehow summoned an even greater sweetness to her voice, and Goode's playing burst forth as if the number of strings on his piano had suddenly tripled. The last verse, which tells of a natural world sympathetic to the joys of a young lover, kindled real romance. It also revealed a hidden order in the evening's songs: in each set, Schubert, Berg, and Schumann, the nightingale made at least one appearance...
After a standing ovation, the dazed crowd was treated to three encores. Two, the Schumann "Erists's" (It is He) from his Song album for the Young, and the Schubert "Rastlose Liebe" (Restless Love), were given, in Upshaw's words, "to urge spring along." The third, the Brahms lullaby, was just for kicks and got laughs...
...play opens with John Wilkes Booth (Jason McNeely '00) peddling off guns to the cast of assassins in a song fittingly titled "Kill a President." Booth cheerfully convinces each assassin that the way to overcome his or her problem--whether political, job-related, or personal frustration--is to kill the president. This opening scene provided the audience's first taste of the Pforzheimer House production's absolutely gorgeous ensemble of voices; McNeely's rich tenor was especially memorable. The scene ends as each assassin points his or her gun at the audience, smiling--a gesture used often during the play...