Thomas Meglioranza

More pics from the Barrel Room

Top: WWI Songs with pianist Caroline Almonte. 
Bottom: Hugo Wolf songs with the Australian String Quartet
(photo credit: Sandy Smith Photos)

Huntington Estate Music Festival

Greetings from Sydney, whence I’m flying home later this afternoon after a very busy week a the Huntington Estate Music Festival.


I promised a few audience members that I would post the WWI-era popular songs I announced from the stage at yesterday morning’s concert.  Here they are:

Keep the Home Fires Burning (Ivor Novello/Lena Guilbert Ford)

Vienna City of My Dreams (Rudolf Sieczynski/Kim Gannon)

Half Minute Songs (Carrie Jacobs Bond)

Roses of Picardy (Haydn Wood/Lt. Fred. E. Weatherly)

Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers (Hermann E. Darewski/R.P. Weston)

Stay Down Here Where You Belong (Irving Berlin)

The Food Song (Some Little Bug is Going to Find You Someday) (Silvio Heim/Benjamin Hapgood Burt and Roy Atwell)

I had a such a great time in Mudgee. Best wishes to everyone I met.

Trauer-Music

I spent a couple of weeks in Oxford last winter making a one-voice-per-part recording of a newly reconstructed Bach cantata (BWV 244a) with the Taverner Consort and three other singers (Emily Van Evera, Clare Wilkinson and Charles Daniels), led by Andrew Parrott.  The CD was recently released in Europe and is now available for pre-order from Amazon in the US.

Karchin's Romulus

A recording of Louis Karchin conducting his sweet one-act comic opera, Romulus, has just been released.



You can order a CD from Amazon here, or download it from iTunes, etc.  The Philadelphia Inquirer has posted a short review here.

(Karchin and me rehearsing at the Guggehneim--photo: Gerry Goodstein)

Last night's set list

Here are the songs Reiko and I performed at Café Sabarsky last night:

Café Sabarsky Interview

An interview relating to my April 28 performance at the Café Sabarsky with pianist Reiko Uchida.

  


1. The program you have assembled for your performance draws material from European musical culture just prior to the First World War. What inspired you to focus on that particular moment in cultural history?

Concord, MA

The view from the crook of the piano at the Concord Free Public Library.  A truly great song recital space.



An Italian-themed recital program that's about as Italian as I am.



Tomato and a clam pie pit stop at Frank Pepe's in Manchester, CT.

April, sing I will

April's a busy month.

On April 28, Ms. Uchida and I return to the Cabaret@Café Sabarsky series at the Neue Galerie for an encore performance of our "Songs of the WWI Era" program, which includes songs by Irving Berlin, Anton Webern, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Charles Ives, Kurt Weill, Ivor Novello, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, Claude Debussy, among many others.  This program was named one of the Top Ten Best Classical Music Performances of the Year by the Philadelphia Inquirer when we performed it there in 2009.  (Once you recover from the shock of the $110 ticket price, it may help to bear in mind that it includes a very fine three course meal, so it's actually a pretty good value.)



On April 16, Reiko and I will be at the historical Concord Free Public Library in Concord, MA performing an old favorite eclectic Italian-themed program of ours, with songs of Schubert, Ives, Busoni, Derek Bermel, Rossini, Fauré, and Cathy Berberian.



On April 6, I'll be singing a recent piece by Louis Karchin for baritone and small orchestra (the excellent Washington Square Ensemble), and a new set of songs by Brian (pronounced "BREE-uhn") Fennelly with pianist Stephen Gosling.

On April 1, I'm at Bard College in their spectacular Fisher Center singing John Adams' The Wound-Dresser with the Longy Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Julian Pellicano.



Oh, and I can also be heard tonight (March 28) at the Guggenheim Museum in a concert celebrating composer David Del Tredici.  I'll be singing his very moving and beautiful song, Matthew Shepard, accompanied by the composer.

Back to Kalamazoo

I took a quick trip with Reiko this weekend to Kalamazoo to sing some Schumann and Mahler songs on the Fontana Chamber Arts series.  Our travel days were pretty punishing, but I managed to get a good night's sleep on a Sleep Number Bed at the Radisson the night before our performance.  I'm a 45.

It was an especially fun challenge to revisit Mahler's Rückert-Lieder, one of the many sets of songs I somehow managed to learn and perform by rote in my late teens at Grinnell College.  I had to work hard to avoid falling into old habits and re-study the songs as though I was encountering them for the first time.  Without a doubt, my experience last summer of smelling a linden tree for the first time (in Manhattan, a few blocks from my apartment--who knew?) helped bring a fresh mindset to Ich atmet' einen linden Duft.



The night of the concert was frigid and snowy, which was a shame, but at least it seemed to deliver an audience of particularly devoted song lovers (lots of head-bobbing and lyric-mouthing out there) which gave us some nice energy and inspiration up on the stage.

[update: a nice review in the Kalamazoo Gazette]

Blizzard 2010