Singing with Strings Concert March 22nd at Concerts in the Village

Concerts in the Village continues its 10th Anniversary Season on Sunday March 22nd with “Singing with Strings.” Singers from the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program and the Broad Street Chamber Players String Quartet join in offering five magically diverse works for solo voice and strings.

Mezzo-soprano Chloë Schaaf is a graduate of Juilliard, the Guildhall School (London), and the Bard program, and also about to begin her second year as a Vocal Fellow at Tanglewood. Her appearances have included engagements with the Albany Symphony Orchestra and taken her to Britain, Canada, China and the Netherlands. Ms. Schaaf will perform Il Tramonto (The Sunset), Ottorino Respighi’s lyrical, richly textured setting of a poem by Shelley.

Baritone CodyRay Caho, a current student at Bard who performed in CITV’s recent offering of Handel’s Acis and Galatea, returns to sing the seldom-heard cycle Love Blows as the Wind Blows written in 1911-12 by the British composer George Butterworth. Butterworth was a close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams, with whom he travelled the countryside documenting over 450 folksongs. Tragically, in 1916 Butterworth lost his life in World War I, thereby depriving later generations of his exceptional talents.

Soprano AddieRose Forstman, a 2019 Bard graduate, brings to this concert her exceptional knowledge of recently composed music with a performance of excerpts from Victoria Bond’s Molly Manybloom, a 1990 song cycle setting text selected from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bond makes particularly imaginative use of the string quartet, drawing from it no fewer than six instrumental combinations, while presenting Ms. Forstman both as a singer and as a speaker.

For his CITV appearances as Handel’s Polypheme last November and as bass soloist in Mozart’s Requiem a year earlier, baritone Wayne Arthur Paul was received with great enthusiasm. He returns to perform Samuel Barber’s setting of Matthew Arnold’s great lyric poem Dover Beach, eerily suggestive of the brooding period just prior to World War II. Mr. Paul’s recent engagements have included a Metropolitan Opera debut in the ensemble of its acclaimed new production of Porgy and Bess.

Soprano Margaret Tigue, a second year student at Bard, makes her CITV debut singing Osvaldo Golijov’s passionate setting of Lúa Descolorida (Moon colorless – “like the color of pale gold”). The original poem is written in Gallego (the language of the Galicia region in Spain), by the poet Rosalía de Castro. This coming summer Ms. Tigue returns to Tanglewood as a Vocal Fellow. She has appeared with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, most recently on very short notice, but to widespread acclaim, in a performance of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

CITV Artistic Director David Smith observes, “What a thrill it will be to celebrate five outstanding singers at the beginning of their careers – and to experience them in ensemble with the principal string players of our own Broad Street Orchestra. For this concert we are once again especially grateful for underwriting by the CITV Emerging Singer Fund.”

To conclude CITV’s 10th Anniversary Season two concerts follow “Singing with Strings”: On April 5th Haydn’s oratorio The Creation and on April 26th excerpts from Mozart’s Da Ponte operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.

The concert starts at 3:00pm, Sunday, March 22nd at Van Buren Hall, 6 Chatham Street (US Route 9), Kinderhook, NY 12106.

Reception follows. Contribution $20. Students and children free. Lift to second floor. For further information and reservations: www.concertsinthevillage.org, or 518-758-6869.