Event Detail

Soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman continue their exploration of the songs of women composers in a concert to be presented on March 8, 2023, at the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall at the UC San Diego Department of Music.  The duo's recording of songs by women composers, This Island, featuring songs by Nadia Boulanger, Marion Bauer, Henriette Bosmans, Elizabeth Claisse and Irene Fuerison, was released by London's AVIE Records in February 2023.  

The upcoming program features works by two illustrious living composers, Tania Leon and Judith Weir as well as little known works by African American composer Margaret Bonds, French composer Elizabeth Claisse, and more. Although written in a wide array of compositional styles, each composer has an uncommon sensitivity to the fusion of text and music, and exceptional skill in writing for the combination of voice and piano.  

British composer Judith Weir's The Voice of Desire, a song cycle written in 2003, is a series of conversations between humans and birds, in which, according to the composer, "the birds seem to have a more sophisticated viewpoint than their human hearers."  With texts by John Keats, Thomas Hardy Robert Bridges and a setting of Yoruba Poetry translated by Ulli Beier, Weir's luminous, intricate writing for the piano provides a perfect framework for vocal writing of immense variety and uncommon skill.  

Cuban-born American Tania Leon was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize and honored at the Kennedy Center.  Her music is characterized by its rhythmic vitality, bold use of instrumental timbre and color and inventive and expressive vocal writing.  The Atwood Songs, with poems by the well-known novelist Margaret Atwood, are by turns exuberant, irreverent and wistful.  Margaret Bonds is best known for her settings of texts by Langston Hughes; our program will present four little known setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  In addition, Elena Ruehr's exquisite piano solo, Erinnerung, and selections from This Island will complete the program.