Program
February 17-18, 2024
Stéphane Denève, conductor
Ying Fang, soprano
Sunnyboy Dladla, tenor
Thomas Lehman, baritone
Arvo Pärt
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Lera Auerbach
Icarus
Richard Wagner
"Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde
Intermission
Carl Orff
Carmina Burana
Fortune, Empress of the World
I. Springtime
On the Green
II. In the Tavern
III. The Courts of Love
Blanziflor et Helena
Fortune, Empress of the World
Ying Fang, soprano
Sunnyboy Dladla, tenor
Thomas Lehman, baritone
St. Louis Symphony Chorus
St. Louis Children’s Choirs
Program Notes
This concert begins with music that Music Director Stéphane Denève has described as “purely, perfectly organized” with a “mathematical beauty that is like the repeating patterns of a leaf.” He explains that Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten explores our relationship with silence and allows us space to meditate on life and loss, just as its composer meditated on the loss of a composer he admired. “Life starts and ends with nothingness,” says Denève. “Music is the same: from silence to silence.”
To further the powerful effect of the music and its place with the “silence” of a still auditorium, he has planned the first half of the concert as a continuous flow of three works. From the serenity of Pärt, we transition immediately into the raw energy and optimism of Lera Auerbach’s Icarus. And the ethereal close of Icarus leads us to the opulent, transfiguring sonorities of the Liebestod or “Love–Death” that concludes Richard Wagner’s tragedy of forbidden love, Tristan und Isolde.
After intermission, singers and choirs join the orchestra on stage and the most thrilling choral moment in music—“O Fortuna!”—launches us into Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Its themes are timeless: you don’t need to be a 13th-century renegade monk to appreciate the frustrating fickleness of Fate, the torments and pleasures of love, or the delights of good food and drink. The words embrace ecstatic meditation, biting parody, teasing eroticism, and earthy pleasures. Carl Orff’s exhilarating music captures to perfection the variety of mood and the sheer infectious vitality.
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Arvo Pärt
Born 1935, Paide, Estonia
Arvo Pärt shuts out modern life. The ancient Russian Orthodox church has guided Pärt for 50 years: the rich sound of bells, the winding lines of chant, the hushed intimacy of a mystical connection with God.
When the English composer Benjamin Britten died on December 4, 1976, Pärt nursed a sense of loss. Living behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet-occupied Estonia, he had never been able to meet Britten in person, and now it would not be possible. But he had “met” Britten’s music and discovered in it what he called an “unusual purity.”
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (Song in memory of Benjamin Britten) conveys something of that purity but the style of this musical memorial is entirely Pärt’s own. Composed in 1977, it is one of the earliest examples of what has become his signature gesture: tintinnabuli—invoking the sounds of bells and their complex overtones. And so the Cantus begins…
A bell tolls—gently. Strings lament from on high, falling further and further each time. Violins first, but soon violas, cellos, and basses. Each part moves at a different pace. The music grows deeper, full of force. The bell continues to toll, quiet, unchanging.
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten is about much more than the death of one person. Here is loss in musical form: how we cling to each moment, only to lose it like sand through our hands; how we try to hold memories, only to watch them fade.
Such is the tragic power of this music that Michael Moore chose it to underpin the scene in his film Fahrenheit 911 when the twin towers of the World Trade Center crash to the ground.
“Time and timelessness are connected,” Pärt has written. “This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all of our contradictions, our obstinacy, our narrow-mindedness, our faith and our grief.”
Adapted from a note by Tim Munro © 2021
First performance: April 7, 1977, Eri Klas conducting the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra
First SLSO-affiliated performance: November 24, 2013, Steven Jarvi conducting the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra
First SLSO performance: March 28, 2021, Stéphane Denève conducting
Instrumentation: strings and bells
Approximate duration: 7 minutes
Icarus
Lera Auerbach
Born 1973 Chelyabinsk, Russia
In the creative arts, excellence in three areas—say composing, performing, and conducting—is a rare feat that might earn someone the moniker “triple threat.” Doubling that and more is Russian-born Lera Auerbach, whose musical efforts are enriched by her expression in poetry, literature, drawing, and painting. In addition to collaborating with some of the world’s top orchestras, she has written several award-winning books of poetry and the children’s book A is for Oboe—a witty reference to the pitch the instrument plays to tune an orchestra—and her artwork is displayed in galleries around the world. In October 2023, to mark her 50th birthday, her artistic talents were honored in a weeklong Auerbach Festival in the Netherlands.
“Wherever it takes you”
In 2011 Auerbach revised the final two movements of her first symphony Chimera, which was composed five years earlier, to create the standalone symphonic poem Icarus. The title came after the work was written, and the composer offers audiences full freedom to interpret the music. “All my music is abstract,” she explains, “but by giving evocative titles I invite the listener to feel free to imagine, to access [their] own memories, associations…You don’t need to understand how or why—just allow the music to take you wherever it takes you.”
Nevertheless, Auerbach’s title choice is powerful; her music sets in motion an epic adventure, one wrought with turbulence and danger, matching the mood of the ancient Greek myth of Icarus. In the story, Icarus and his father Daedalus use creative means to escape captivity on the island of Crete, crafting two sets of wings using bird feathers and beeswax. The father–son pair are to fly across the sea to safety together, but only by following Daedalus’s rules: fly too low and the moisture of the sea will weigh down the wings’ feathers; fly too high and the sun will heat the wax that holds them together. The only safe way is to travel between the extremes. Unfortunately, Icarus defies his father, flying higher and higher, until his hubris ultimately leads to his demise.
“What makes this myth so touching,” says Auerbach, “is Icarus’s impatience of the heart, his wish to reach the unreachable, the intensity of the ecstatic brevity of his flight and inevitability of his fall. If Icarus were to fly safely—there would be no myth. His tragic death is beautiful.”
A dramatic journey of extremes
Auerbach’s orchestral setting bursts to life with an unsettling and raw opening, sparking curiosity about where the experience will lead. When the sky clears, only for a brief moment, a solo violin sings a mysterious recitative. Then, a ghostly trio comprising flute, cello, and bass clarinet continues to spin the tale before the unrelenting opening motive returns with a fury.
Accented, dissonant trills across the ensemble introduce a new soundscape that is darker still and even more brooding. Solo violin and upper woodwinds emerge from the darkness, juxtaposing a lyrical melody with a sense of impending doom. The music swirls higher and higher, as a listener might imagine Icarus’s ascent towards the sun. As the strings reach the upper extreme of their range and disappear into the heavens, the lowest instruments in the orchestra quietly and carefully move in the other direction, reaching down into the depths of the earth.
Icarus employs an electronic instrument rarely seen on the orchestral stage—the theremin—that is more typically at home in scores of films and TV shows containing otherworldly elements, such as First Man (2018) and the Apple TV+ series The Big Door Prize. Its haunting, ethereal waves of sound push the orchestra into a fantastical musical realm.
Emma Plehal © 2024
First performance: July 18, 2011, Charles Dutoit conducting the Verbier Festival Orchestra
First SLSO performance: These concerts
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, theremin, strings
Approximate duration: 12 minutes
"Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde
Richard Wagner
Born 1813, Leipzig, Germany
Died 1883, Venice, Italy
Richard Wagner based nearly all of his operas on big themes and mythic stories. Forbidden passion is, of course, one of the most compelling themes in world literature, and its archetypal dramatization is the legend of Tristan and Isolde, those unhappy lovers whose magic-induced desire for each other is thwarted by circumstance and obligation. (Isolde is betrothed to Cornwall’s King Mark, whom Tristan is sworn to serve.) Their story inspired several medieval narrative poems as well as Wagner’s landmark opera Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner began writing this work in 1857, at a time he himself was in love with the wife of a wealthy benefactor. The resonance between the Tristan story and his own circumstance sparked an outpouring of music whose intimation of erotic passion was unprecedented and remains unsurpassed. Wagner completed Tristan und Isolde in 1859, but he had to wait half-a-dozen years for its first production. Meanwhile, he took to presenting orchestral highlights from the opera at every opportunity, making his own arrangement of the Prelude and Liebestod—a top-and-tail pair of excerpts that compresses the essence of four hours into 20 minutes.
Central to Tristan und Isolde is the notion of insatiable love intimately linked with death, for the couple’s desire is so intense, so all consuming, that it can be fulfilled only by casting off the restraints of the material world. In the opera’s final scene, Isolde cradles the body of the slain Tristan. Gazing at him, she launches into an aria that has long been known as the “Liebestod,” or “Love–Death.” From its quiet beginning, Isolde’s meditation grows ever more ecstatic until at last, as Wagner explained, she is “transformed” from mere flesh and blood to a more ethereal creature that can join her lover in a realm beyond this earthly one. As the opera ends, the lifeless bodies of Tristan and Isolde lie together on stage as the music suggests their spirits soaring serenely as one.
Wagner called this great final scene “Isolde’s Transfiguration.” We have the virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt to thank for the “Liebestod” title, which he assigned to his own transcription of the music for piano, and which has clung (with Wagner’s approval) to this impassioned farewell to love and life. Although orchestras sometimes “resurrect” the original vocal line and perform the “Liebestod” in concert with a singer, the orchestration is so rich and so “complete” that Wagner’s arrangement, as we perform in this concert, loses none of the music’s devastating power.
Adapted from a note by Paul Schiavo © 2009
First performance: Although the opera Tristan und Isolde did not receive its first production
until June 10, 1865, its Prelude was performed as early as March 12, 1859, when Hans von Bülow conducted it in Prague, and Wagner conducted the Prelude and Liebestod together for the first time on March 10, 1863, at a concert in St. Petersburg.
First SLSO performance: March 4, 1909, Max Zach conducting
Most recent SLSO performance: May 2, 2010, David Robertson conducting, Christine Brewer as soprano soloist
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, strings
Approximate duration: 9 minutes
Carmina Burana
Carl Orff
Born 1895, Munich, Germany
Died 1982, Munich, Germany
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)
1. O Fortuna –
2. Fortune plango vulnera
I. Primo Vere (In Springtime)
3. Veris leta facies –
4. Omnia Sol temperat (baritone solo) –
5. Ecce gratum
Uf dem Anger (On the Green)
6. Tanz –
7. Floret silva –
8. Chramer, gip die varwe mir (soprano solo)–
9. Reie – Swaz hie gat umbe
10. Were diu werlt alle min
II. In Taberna (In the Tavern)
11. Estuans interius (baritone solo) –
12. Olim lacus colueram (tenor solo) –
13. Ego sum abbas (baritone solo) –
14. In taberna quando sumus
III. Cour d’amours (The Court of Love)
15. Amor volat undique (soprano solo) –
16. Dies, nox et omnia (baritone solo) –
17. Stetit puella (soprano solo) –
18. Circa mea pectora (baritone solo) –
19. Si puer com puellula –
20. Veni, veni, venias –
21. In trutina (soprano solo) –
22. Tempus est iocundum (soprano and baritone solos) –
23. Dulcissime (soprano solo) –
Blanziflor et Helena (Blanziflor and Helena)
24. Ave formosissima –
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
25. O Fortuna
In 1803, a remarkable manuscript was discovered in a medieval Benedictine monastery at Beuern, in southern Germany. This document was not a religious text but a collection of secular songs and poems written by wandering students and minstrels during the 12th and 13th centuries. The verses, in Latin, Old French, and Middle-High German, touched a broad range of topics. They satirized the clergy and nobility; celebrated the passing seasons; complained of poverty, greed, and corruption; praised the pleasures of wine and song; and above all sang the joys and sorrows of love—all while expressing a fatalistic view of human destiny controlled by a “wheel of fortune.” By turns blatant and refined, the language of these poems reflected the varied backgrounds and social stations of their authors, and the verses revealed a freshness that is striking even today. They were published in 1847 under the title Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuern). In 1935 they came to the attention of an obscure German composer named Carl Orff.
Orff is one of the more curious figures of 20th-century music. He received a solid if unremarkable musical training and, like so many composers of his generation, absorbed the influence first of the German late-Romantics—particularly Richard Strauss and the young Arnold Schoenberg—and later of Igor Stravinsky. But his interests soon spread beyond the concerns of modern composition. During his 20s, he became involved with the theater and soon became fascinated with the possibility of combining the various arts to produce a spectacle whose total effect was greater than the sum of its parts, an idea similar to Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (complete work of art).
At about the same time, Orff developed a strong interest in early music, particularly that of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Finally, in 1924, he began an association with the dancer Dorothee Gunther and with her established an educational method aimed at “reviving the natural unity of music and movement.” Orff’s work in this area, and in early music education generally, continued for decades, resulting in the famous Orff-Schulwerk teaching program, which employs simple percussion instruments and rhythmic movement, a method now widely used throughout the world.
Far from remaining isolated, these interests came together in a fascinating synthesis in Orff’s creative work. He sought new ways to dramatize concert music, presenting staged versions of oratorios and other pieces. His own compositions relied increasingly on modal melodies derived from medieval plainchant, and on the percussion instruments and simplicity of utterance that characterize Orff-Schulwerk. Orff plainly was searching for a vehicle by which to bring these disparate elements together in a telling and original way. He found it in Carmina Burana.
Orff composed his setting of Beuern monastery verses in 1935–36. Upon completing it, he wrote to his publisher: “Everything I have written to date…can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.” Hearing the composition, one can understand how Orff might have been tempted to make this extreme declaration, for the sound of Carmina Burana was virtually unprecedented. Its pounding and repetitive rhythms, simple motifs, elemental harmonies, and huge orchestral sound blocks convey a pagan and often quite orgiastic energy. In an audacious gambit, Orff deliberately abandoned Western music’s traditional techniques of counterpoint and thematic development in favor of a deliberately primeval rhetoric. This aimed unapologetically for physical and emotional sensation rather than aesthetic response. “In all my work,” Orff wrote later, “my final concern is not with musical but with spiritual exposition.” Carmina Burana may indeed turn its back on “musical exposition” as this is usually conceived, but its raw emotive power cannot be ignored.
Framing Carmina Burana is a massive chorus, “O Fortuna,” whose allusion to both happiness and woe, “power and poverty alike,” sets out a broad canvas of human experience to be filled by the intervening numbers. These are divided into three large sections. The first, “In Springtime,” is a hymn to reawakening nature and love.
“In the Tavern” treats the pains and pleasures of hedonistic abandon. Highlights of this section include the lament of the roasting swan, in which both tenor soloist and first bassoon are pushed to the top of their range, and a thrilling drinking song for the men of the chorus.
“The Court of Love,” the work’s final section, celebrates love and sensuality. Listen for the ecstatic soprano solo “Dulcissime” leading into the jubilant chorus “Blanziflor and Helena.” This is followed by a reprise of the opening chorus, which brings the work full circle.
Carmina Burana was first heard in 1937, and it immediately brought Orff international attention. It has since become one of the most frequently performed of modern choral works, its impact undiminished in the decades since Orff composed it.
Adapted from a note by Paul Schiavo © 2014
First performance: June 8, 1937, staged by Frankfurt Opera with conductor Bertil
Wetzelsberger
First SLSO performance: January 21, 1961, Edouard van Remootel conducting, Donna Precht soprano, Kenneth Wikowsky tenor, Jay Willoughby baritone, Legend Singers, Sumner High School A Cappella Choir
Most recent SLSO performance: February 11, 2018, Bramwell Tovey conducting, Tracy Dahl soprano, Benjamin Butterfield tenor, Stephen Powell baritone, St. Louis Symphony Chorus, The St. Louis Children’s Choirs
Instrumentation: solo soprano, tenor, and baritone; mixed chorus and children’s choir; 3 flutes (2nd and 3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet, 3rd doubling E-flat clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 pianos, celesta, strings
Approximate duration: 1 hour 5 minutes
Ying Fang
Artist
This season sees Chinese-born soprano Ying Fang return to the Paris National Opera for appearances as Zerlina (in Don Giovanni), Poppea (Agrippina), and Pamina (Die Zauberflöte); to the Metropolitan Opera to make her role debut as Euridice (Orfeo ed Euridice); and to Santa Fe Opera for her role debut as Sophie (Der Rosenkavalier). In concert, she will sing Mozart’s Requiem on tour and in a recording with Ensemble Pygmalion, and make her Munich Philharmonic debut in Mozart’s Mass in C minor, as well as singing Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (North Netherlands Orchestra), and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Susanna Mälkki). Later this month she will reprise Carmina Burana at Carnegie Hall, appearing with the Orchestra of St. Lukes.
Recent stage performance highlights have included her house debut with the Vienna State Opera as Susanna in a new Barry Kosky production of Le nozze di Figaro, a role she reprised for the Handel and Haydn Society, and appearances for Metropolitan Opera as Ilia (Idomeneo) and Zerlina (Don Giovanni). On the concert platform she has sung Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Robin Ticciati, made her Atlanta Symphony Orchestra debut in Ein deutsches Requiem (conducted by Donald Runnicles), and sung Mozart’s Mass in C minor and Handel’s Messiah with the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Manfred Honeck. She has also given recitals at Cal Performances, Dallas Opera, and the Park Avenue Armory, New York.
Ying Fang studied at the Shanghai Conservatory (where in 2009 she was one of the youngest operatic artists to win the China Golden Bell Award for Music) and the Juilliard School of Music before joining the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program of the New York Metropolitan Opera.
Sunnyboy Dladla
Artist
South African Sunnyboy Dladla is a sought-after bel canto tenor, with a radiant and agile voice well-suited to the operas of Rossini and signature roles such as Count Almaviva (Il barbiere de Siviglia) and Don Ramiro (La Cenerentola).
He was born in KwaZulu-Natal and raised in South Africa, where he studied at Cape Town University. He then completed a master’s degree at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland, and in 2012–2014 participated in Zurich Opera’s International Opera Studio. This was followed by soloist engagements in German opera houses including Deutsche Oper Berlin, and in 2020 he joined the Ensemble at the Hanover State Opera, where his roles have included Count Almaviva (Il barbiere), Ferrando (Così fan tutte), Cassio (Otello), Peter Quint (The Turn of the Screw), and his recent debut as Leopold (La Juive). He has also sung Almaviva for the Rossini Opera Festival, Norwegian National Opera, Leipzig Opera, Stuttgart State Opera, and many more opera houses.
As a concert artist he has performed Carmina Burana extensively, from Bucharest (conducted by Cristian Măcelaru) to Toronto, Grand Teton, and the Edinburgh Festival (all conducted by Donald Runnicles). This season he sings Carmina Burana with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. The 2023/24 season also sees his house debut with the Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona, singing Don Ramiro, and a role debut as Oraspe (Aureliano in Palmira) at the Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro.
He has twice appeared in the BBC Proms, in 2018 with the LSO and Simon Rattle (L’enfant et les sortilèges) and in 2019 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Nathalie Stutzmann (Mozart’s Requiem). His many recordings include DVDs of Mose in Egitto, recorded live at the Bregenz Festival, and Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Dutch National Opera).
Thomas Lehman
Artist
American baritone Thomas Lehman is a member of the Ensemble at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music.
In August 2023 he made his role debut as Wolfram in a concert performance of Tannhäuser at the Edinburgh International Festival conducted by Donald Runnicles, closely followed by his debut at San Francisco Opera as Heerufer in David Alden’s production of Lohengrin. This season he will also make role debuts in new Deutsche Oper Berlin productions of Pique Dame (as Yeletsky) and Nixon in China (as Nixon).
On the concert platform he made his BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra debut singing Carmina Burana in the opening concert of the 2022 Edinburgh Festival, and he recently made his Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra debut singing Donner (Das Rheingold) in concerts in Paris, Rotterdam, Dortmund, and Baden-Baden conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
At Deutsche Oper Berlin his recent appearances include Gunther in a new production of Götterdämmerung, Lucifer in a new production of Antikrist, and Guy de Montfort in Les Vêpres siciliennes, as well as role debuts as Germont (La traviata) and Don Fernando in a new production of Fidelio. Other recent appearances in Berlin include Lescaut (Puccini’s Manon Lescaut) conducted by Simon Rattle. Ford (Falstaff), Marcello (La bohème), Renato (Un ballo in maschera), Figaro (Il barbiere di Siviglia), Count Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Valentin (Faust), and Silvio (Pagliacci).
As a guest artist he has sung Ford in Barrie Kosky’s production of Falstaff (Komische Oper Berlin), Ibn Hakia in a new production of Iolanta (Bern), Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro (Theater Basel), Lescaut (Edinburgh International Festival), Silvio (Teatro São Carlos, Lisbon), and Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights for Opéra national de Lorraine.
Andrew Whitfield
Artist
Andrew Whitfield is Chorus Master for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. He was previously chorus master and assistant conductor of Minnesota Opera, where he conducted productions of La traviata and Il barbiere di Siviglia, and prepared the chorus for the premieres of The Fix by Joe Puckett and Paola Prestini’s Edward Tulane. Before moving to the Twin Cities in 2018, he lived for nine years in the Bay Area, where he was a prompter for the San Francisco Opera and Resident Conductor and Chorus Master at Opera San José (2011–2018). While at Opera San José he conducted 16 productions, including Falstaff, Der fliegende Holländer, Hansel and Gretel, Tosca, La rondine, Il trovatore, and La bohème.
In 2021 he joined the music staff of the Metropolitan Opera as prompter for The Magic Flute; he returned to the Met the following season as assistant conductor for La traviata. In 2022 he was guest chorus director for the San Francisco Symphony’s program of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms.
As a chorus director, he has prepared more than 40 operas, including the U.S. premiere and recording of Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella, and Minnesota Opera’s revival and recording of Silent Night by Kevin Puts. Equally active in symphonic repertoire, Andrew Whitfield has served as assistant–cover conductor at the San Francisco Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra, working with conductors such as Jane Glover, Pablo Heras-Casado, Edward Gardner, Krzysztof Urbański, Michael Tilson Thomas, Semyon Bychkov, Susanna Mälkki, and Karina Canellakis.
Andrew Whitfield returns to the SLSO after preparing the St. Louis Symphony Chorus for Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in November 2023.
Alyson Moore
Artist
Dr. Alyson Moore is a scholar, choral educator, and lyric soprano. She completed her doctorate in vocal performance from Shenandoah Conservatory in 2010, receiving the Dean’s Graduate Scholar Award for excellence in scholarship for her dissertation “Mad Women in Opera: An Investigation of Madness and Selected Mad Scenes for Soprano.”
In 2009, she taught masterclasses and performed Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem with the Ho Chi Minh Symphony Orchestra in Vietnam. In 2010, she traveled to Buenos Aires to research and perform the music of Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino. While serving as the Director of Arts at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Maryland, her choirs performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the U.S. State Department, and Blair House. Her choirs performed at the International Kodály Symposium in Budapest and Kecskemét, Hungary in 2013.
In addition to her work as a regional choral clinician and adjudicator, Alyson Moore is the founder of the American Kodály Children’s Chorus in Baltimore, where she served as Artistic Director for seven years. She is also a performer and director of musical theater and is the director of choirs at University High School in Fresno. She is on the voice faculty at Fresno Pacific University and serves as Artistic Director for the Fresno Choral Artists.
Program Notes are sponsored by Washington University Physicians.