Mark's 2009 concert repertoire

I thought that I would put up a little information about how I chose the repertoire for this years' concert series. Last year I picked all of my favorite pieces like the The Songs of Travel, Let Us Garlands Bring, and Don Quichotte. For this year's concerts I went back to my Peabody days and revisited the Dichterliebe. I always like pieces that have a story line. I really feel that you can divide the piece into a little play, or opera. For this series we thought that a selection would fit our concert length better than performing the whole work. I decided to sing the beginning 4 pieces, then 7, 8, 11, and 12. Schumann has written a really beautiful postlude for piece 12 (Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen), and it seemed that we could give an abbreviated performance while still keep the feeling of the piece.

My second set I created. I was trying to come up with some sort of "Sea Farer", or 'The call of the sea" themed set. I could only find a couple of pieces that I thought really fit, so in order to keep "Sea Fever", (a song by John Ireland that I really like), I thought I would do a set of English composers. I have one song each from J. Ireland, Quilter, Finzi, Vaughan-Williams, and Butterworth. There are obviously many more great English composers, but this is a good representation of my favorite. The other selections of the set after Sea Fever are Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, To Lizbie Brown, Bredon Hill, Silent Noon. I end this set with Silent Noon, which I think is my favorite piece in art song literature.

"A Shropshire Lad" from G. Butterworth is my third set for this series. This is another cycle of songs that has a very strong storyline. This is another a cycle of songs, like "The Songs of Travel", that my first voice teacher Gordon Finlay tried to get me to sing, but when I first went through them, they did not speak to me. Now, just like "The Songs of Travel", when I look back I don't know what I was thinking. This set is worth traveling for just to hear "The Lads in their Hundreds", the fifth song in the set. It talks about all of the different kinds of people that are lost in war, and how when you see them in the street you will never know that they will soon die.

My final set this year is shared with Catherine. We are splitting up the Old American Songs. Catherine divided the selections up very evenly. She took all of the pieces she really loves, the beautiful slow pieces, and I got the fast, or funny left-over pieces. No, really, I love all my pieces... Aaron Copland is one of my favorite composers. I wish that he had written more for the male voice. This was always music that I jumped at learning in undergraduate, because it is so accessible. Now that I learn music for fun, not school-work, I love these pieces for the depth of the accompaniment either in the orchestral or piano medium.

Hope to see you there,

Mark