Program

Exsultate, Jubilate, K. 165 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

Wanda Yang Temko, soprano; William Ransom, piano

Bassoon Concerto in B-flat Major, K. 191 Mozart

Allegro

Andante ma adagio

Rondo: tempo di menuetto

Nathan Muz, bassoon; Matt Brower, piano

From Old American Songs Aaron Copland

Long Time Ago (1900–1990)

Walls of Zion

From Let Us Garlands Bring Gerald Finzi

Who Is Sylvia? (1901–1956)

It Was a Lover and His Lass

The

Dew Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)

The Bonnie Earl o’Moray Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962)

Daniel Cole, bass-baritone; William Ransom, piano

“Una tenera occhiatina” from L’elisir d’amore Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848)

Wanda

Soprano Wanda Yang Temko is a respected singer, voice teacher, and arts advocate in the Atlanta area. She has a doctorate in performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Other degrees include a master of music degree in voice performance from Georgia State University and a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and liberal studies from Emory University. Yang Temko made her international operatic debut in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in Rome; other highlights include the Mother in Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors and Morgana in Handel’s Alcina.

Acclaimed for performances on the operatic and concert stages, Yang Temko has collaborated with some of the most renowned Early Music artists of our time, including Andrew Lawrence-King, Paul Hillier, Nigel North, Paul Elliot, and Stanley Ritchie. Her interest in contemporary music is equally keen, as evidenced by her skilled and nuanced performances of the works of Olivier Messiaen. As a professional chorister, she has performed with conductors such as Robert Shaw, Robert Spano, Donald Runnicles, William Fred Scott, and Alfred Calabrese. Yang Temko is a founding member of Skylark Ensemble. Sought after as a recitalist and soloist, she also maintains an active private voice studio and has served on the boards of Kinnara Ensemble, Friends of Theater at Emory, ATL Symphony Musicians Foundation, Festival Singers of Atlanta, Atlanta Early Music Alliance, and Atlanta Young Singers.

A multifaceted performer, Yang Temko was the host of Afternoon Classics and Concert 90 on Atlanta’s NPR affilliate, WABE 90.1 FM, where for seven seasons she also wrote, produced, and hosted a weekly show highlighting singers and their connections to their art and the world, called the Art of Song. Yang Temko can also be heard as Detective Phillips in Mind’s Ear Audio Productions’ French Quarter, a radio drama series featured on National Public Radio’s NPR Playhouse. Equally at home as a stage director, Yang Temko received warm reviews for her direction of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde for the Cathedral of St. Philip.

Nathan Muz is a bassoonist and applied mathematics major at Emory University, where he is a student of Anthony Georgeson. Next year, he will attend the master of music program at Cleveland Institute of Music studying under John Clouser, principal bassoon of the Cleveland Orchestra. Highlights of Muz’s time at Emory include performances with the Emory University Symphony Orchestra as principal bassoon in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, and

Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments. In 2023, Muz is looking forward to performances of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Orff’s Carmina Burana, and appearing with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as guest second bassoon.

Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Muz served as a bassoonist in the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra for four seasons. Additionally, he has performed with the Boston University Tanglewood Institute’s Young Artists’ Orchestra and New England Conservatory’s Preparatory School. He has performed in Boston’s Symphony Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Prior to coming to Emory, Muz was a student of Donald Bravo, Judith Bedford, and Ronald Haroutunian.

Matt Brower is a pianist, coach, and an MTNA Nationally Certified Teacher of Music whose expertise spans a variety of genres, from classical piano, chamber music, opera, and art song to musical theater and jazz. Brower has appeared in many prestigious venues throughout the United States and China, including Carnegie Hall, the Kimmel Center, and the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, and has been featured on WRTI, Philadelphia’s classical radio station. He has performed with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia as well as members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Baltimore Symphony. Brower is a member of 6-WIRE, a violin–erhu–piano trio that mixes traditional chamber music with new styles from around the world. A Chamber Music of America grantee, 6-WIRE has had the honor of performing for then-Vice President Joe Biden on two occasions. Its latest album, 6-WIRE on 57th, showcases music from its sold-out 2019 Carnegie Hall concert.

As a vocal coach and choral accompanist, Brower has held positions at Opera Philadelphia, Westminster Choir College, the Curtis Institute Summerfest Young Artist Voice Program, the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy, Opera in the Ozarks, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the University of Delaware, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, Brower served as director of the collaborative piano program at the University of Delaware’s Master Players Summer Festival and on the faculty of the Collaborative Piano Sumer Institute at Louisiana State University in 2020. In addition to his duties at Emory’s main campus, Brower is a teaching affiliate at Oxford College where he accompanies the Oxford Chorale and several chamber ensembles, an artist affiliate in piano at Agnes Scott College, and a piano faculty member of the Atlanta Music High School program at the Community Music Centers of Atlanta. He has a doctor of musical arts degree and a master of music degree from the

University of Michigan and a bachelor of music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory. Prior to his current academic appointments, Brower was visiting assistant professor of piano at Washington College in Maryland, where he co-founded the Washington College Piano Festival.

In 1998, basso cantante Daniel Cole interrupted his doctoral degree in conducting from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music to pursue a professional studies in opera degree at Temple University. That same year he won the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions in the New Jersey district and placed first in the New York regional finals. Since then Cole has appeared in theaters in Lisbon, Cologne, Taiwan, Amsterdam, and New York. He has performed with regional opera companies including Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Dayton Opera, Kentucky Opera, Opera Boston, Utah Festival Opera, Opera Carolina, and Sarasota Opera, to name a few. Cole has established a respectable concert career, including performances of Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, Haydn’s Paukenmesse with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Bernard Rands’ Canti dell’ Eclisse with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Beethoven’s Mass in C under the baton of Jane Glover at SUNY Purchase, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor with the Canton (Ohio) Symphony, and the Mozart Requiem in his debut at Carnegie Hall. Cole also performed and recorded the Voice of God in Dominic Argento’s Jonah and the Whale on the BMOP label. However, his favorite performances have been collaborating on Schubert’s Winterreise with William Ransom. Cole completed a DM in choral conducting from Indiana University in 2009. While a student at Indiana he performed and recorded with the award-winning Concord Ensemble (Dorian Records), a six-voice male vocal ensemble. He also assisted the famed early music conductor Paul Hillier, performing and recording with Theatre of Voices and the Pro Arte Singers on the Harmonia Mundi label. Cole has worked under and served as assistant conductor to Fiora Contino, Thomas Dunn, Robert Porco, and Jan Harrington. He has also served as the chorus master and assistant conductor for the Utah Festival Opera and Opera Illinois.

Following a call to ministry, Cole accepted a position as the director of music at First Presbyterian Church (ARP) in Columbia, South Carolina, where he has served since 2007. In additional to providing music for morning and evening worship services, choirs of First Presbyterian Church have recorded three CDs, and performed major choral/orchestral works, including Messiah, Elijah, St. Matthew Passion, Esther, Creation, Chichester Psalms, and Lincoln Hanks’s Tegel Passion. Cole has also served on the voice and choral faculty at the University of South Carolina.