MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE featuring SUSAN GRAHAM, mezzo-soprano A Standing Witness Friday, September 23, 2022 at 8 p.m.
This concert is presented by the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.
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Design and Photography Credits
Cover Design: Nick Surbey | Program Design: Lisa Baron Back Cover Photo: Mark Teague
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Acknowledgment
This season, the Schwartz Center is celebrating 20 years of world-class performances and wishes to gratefully acknowledge the generous ongoing support of Donna and Marvin Schwartz.
Ushers
The Schwartz Center welcomes a volunteer usher corps of approximately 60 members each year. Visit schwartz.emory.edu/volunteer or call 404.727.6640 for ushering opportunities.
This program is made possible by a generous gift from the late Flora Glenn Candler, a friend and patron of music at Emory University.
Front cover collage courtesy of artists.
CONCERTCANDLERSERIES
A STANDING WITNESS with SUSAN GRAHAM, mezzo-soprano and MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE
Friday, September 23, 2022, 8:00 p.m.
Carol Wincenc, flute; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; Siwoo Kim, violin; Melissa Reardon, viola; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello; Michael Boriskin, piano
Emerson Concert Hall
Schwartz Center for Performing Arts
2022–2023
(9/11 and the war in Iraq.)
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Epilogue
(The 90s: an epidemic of greed. Technology takes a leap, news and info accumulation speeds up—“Can I have some more, sir?”)
(COVID-19. Black Lives Matter. A nation spiraling through fear, splintered by blame.)
[Commissioned by Music Accord, the Friends of Copland House, and Ezriel Kornel for Susan Graham and Music from Copland House]
Twelfth Testimony
Sixth Testimony
Eleventh Testimony
First(Testimony
Fifth Testimony
Two assassinations. The Democratic national convention. Social crisis that was 1968.)
Tenth Testimony
Eighth Testimony
(Barack Obama. Reemergence of the American Dream.)
Fourth Testimony
—ATLANTA PREMIERE—
(Roe v. Wade. A woman’s right to choose.)
Second Testimony
Third Testimony
(Vietnam/bombing of Cambodia. Muhammad Ali refuses to be enlisted.)
(The AIDS epidemic, and America’s reaction to it . . . )
(Richard Nixon, Watergate, the heroes, and the goats. The end of the war in Vietnam.)
Seventh Testimony
Ninth Testimony [Elegy]
(The dark cloud of Donald Trump. The rise of neo-fascism in America. The war on immigrants. The media demonized. “The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming. The end of honesty and truth. #Me Too.)
A Standing Witness (2020) Richard Danielpour (b. 1956) Prologue Rita Dove (b. 1952)
(End of the Soviet Union. Fall of the Berlin Wall. First Gulf War.)
(Moonlanding. Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at the end of the festival.)
Program
A Standing Witness
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With the COVID-19 pandemic taking hold of the country just at that time, and cancelling the multiple premieres of A Standing Witness scheduled to begin that summer, I was able to further reflect upon and refine the score. Susan soon suggested that we add a song about
We also spoke of the text, and I immediately thought of Rita Dove. Although I had met her only once many years earlier, I felt she would be perfect, as I knew of the strength, intensity, and depth of her writing, as well as how deeply rooted in American history her work has been.
In 2018, I called my longtime friend and colleague, pianist and Copland House Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin, about an idea I had for an evening-length song cycle. In this major work, a woman would tell the story of our country during the last 50 years, revealing her identity only in the epilogue. When I described the piece and the surprising identity of its central “character,” this witness to history, Michael had enthusiastically said “we’re in,” with the Music from Copland House ensemble agreeing to arrange for its commission, and then premiere, tour, and record the work. This quickly focused my thoughts about writing the piece for an ensemble of six instrumentalists who would partner with, rather than “accompany,” the vocalist.
Program Notes
Early on, I decided that the work should be built upon approximately a dozen songs, each of which would illuminate an important historical topic or event from the past half-century. These “testimonies,” which Rita suggested they be called, would be bookended by a prologue (about truth) and an epilogue (revealing our witness’s identity and her poignant plea that underlies the entire work). In the spring of 2019, Rita began sending her new poems, which impressed me with the richness of their content and imagery, and I quickly felt as if I had been given an opportunity to create something of lasting value with this remarkable poetry of a great artist. I immediately started setting the poems in Los Angeles that spring, continued working on the cycle in Italy throughout the summer, and completed a draft of all the songs in April 2020.
From the outset, I believed that not just any voice should bring this piece to life, but a mezzo-soprano—and I intuitively sensed that this mezzo should be the incomparable Susan Graham. While we had never worked together, I was very familiar with her artistry, and strongly believed that hers was the right voice in sound, temperament, and authority to be our “standing witness.”
A Standing Witness begins in 1968—a watershed year of political, societal, and cultural turmoil—and follows a trajectory of American civilization that encompasses the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, Muhammad Ali and the draft, the Nixon Presidency and Watergate, the struggles with women’s rights and the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the culture of greed in the 1990s, the cataclysm of 9/11 (an instrumental
6 the pandemic itself, and in the fall of 2020, Rita graciously provided another compelling poem, which became the last “testimony” just before the epilogue. Its instrumentation was not for the full ensemble present throughout the rest of the piece, but only for cello and piano, reflecting the barren, hollowed-out feeling that shrouded America’s bustling cities.
A Standing Witness was commissioned by Music Accord, a consortium of top-tier American concert presenters, with additional support from the Friends of Copland House. Rita Dove’s eponymous poetry cycle was commissioned by Copland House and its Board President Ezriel Kornel.
7 elegy), the seminal advent of America’s first Black president, and the political upheavals of current events. Perhaps more of a monodrama with instrumental partners (not accompanists) than a song cycle, this sweeping retrospective—both historical and artistic in nature—is an invitation to bring forth what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” It asks two questions: where have we come from as Americans, and where are we going? It is ultimately written for those who are, as our witness intones, ready to listen.
“A Standing Witness has the potential to become one of the most influential compositions of this century.”
—Vermont Public Radio
—Notes by Richard Danielpour
SurelySurely
. . .
Prologue
Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spoken on a motel balcony, shouted in a hotel kitchen. No kin can make this journey for you. The route’s locked in. Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken the bodies of its makers? Beyond the smoke and ashes, what you hear rising is nothing but the wind. Who comforts you? Now that the wheel has broken, grief is the constant. Hope: the last word spoken.
Surely there must be something beautiful to smile upon— the umbered blue edge of sky as it fades into evening, the brusque green heave of the sea. When I look up, surely there will be a cloud or a lone star dangling. Truth is, the Truth has gone walking— left her perch for the doves and ravens to ravage, hightailed it to the hills, to the quiet beyond the rivers and trees. No matter what ragged carnival may be thronging the streets, what bleak homestead or plantation of sorrows howling its dominion, Truth would say these are arrogant times. Believers slaughter their doubters while the greedy oil their lips with excuses and the righteous turn merciless; the merciful, mad.
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Texts
First Testimony
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken? No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin. Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken. In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin. Who comforts you now? That the wheel has broken is Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on You . . .
(Two assassinations. The Democratic national convention. Social crisis that was 1968.)
(Overview of the beauty and misery that has been the history of America. The standing witness identifies herself as a witness and nothing more . . . )
Moonlanding. Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at the end of the festival.)
Year of the moon, year of love & music: Everyone in batik, dripping beads & good will; peace to the world, peace to the Universe! Sing along, kiss a stranger; blankets quilting the hill. Three days of music—did you really imagine this was all the excuse you would need? Rain be damned; rock’n roll in the mud! The bread can run low, but please not the weed— then the last one steps onstage, fringed like a wild saint. Do you see? he pleads. A scorched sound: Hear it? Lost in combat, blind to love—your anthem shredding the heavens as the bombs pour down.(
There’s a war going on, but he’s having none of it. He flicks his angry eyes, then flings out a rhyme quick as tossing a biscuit to a dog. He’s our homegrown warrior, America’s toffee-toned Titan; how dare he swagger in the name of peace? No black man strutting his minstrel ambitions deserves those eloquent lips: Swat him down, pin him to the mat! And so they mutter, hell-bent on keeping their own destiny unscathed & brazenly manifest.
(Vietnam/bombing of Cambodia. Muhammad Ali refuses to be enlisted.)
Butterfly, butterfly on the wall Can’t you hear your country call?
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Second Testimony
Third Testimony
Black man’s got no business being both pretty and bold—with a right hook as swift as his banter, his feet a flurry of insults, disguised as dance.
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(Richard Nixon, Watergate, the heroes and the goats. The end of the war in Vietnam.)
I’m not a crook he crowed, and people believed him, persuaded by flags and honor guard; that he had trusted his generals’ reports did not justify terminating their trust in him, leader of the free world balls-deep in the muck of a war no one would claim to have started
. . . By any means necessary, he was thinking, as he recorded another muddy deal, then sent out his plumbers to plug the leaks. Who wouldn’t prefer to be standing high and dry with someone else’s fingers in the dike?
She was a mother. She was a girl who dreamed of becoming a mother someday. She was either a tease or a tramp, a lover or a wife—still she had to do the counting; was accused of lacking spontaneity, being a cold-hearted bitch; but if the days didn’t add up, she’d end up straddling a cold table in a dingy back room or waving Goodbye Future. She was jogging. On the late shift. Unlocking her car. And though she still remembered the tart smack of his sweat when he held her down, horse radish on his tongue— none of this was she permitted to say while lawyers argued her right to privacy citing statute and precedent until the court declared Enough! And she and her body were free to go.
Fourth Testimony
(Roe v. Wade. A woman’s right to choose.)
A little eavesdropping, a few ruffled papers hardly constitutes a heist: let’s call it a domestic incursion; and that the facts have been brought to light means the system is working. No need for alarm: a crook is just a bend in the road not yet traveled— he’s simply waiting for the smoke to clear.
Fifth Testimony
(The AIDS epidemic, and America’s reaction to it . . . )
Rail against the fleeing gods, Spit into the wind; you’ll tire soon enough. The worst is always Unimaginable, though you knew well before the verdict dropped— Weakness. Fever. Chills. Those greedy, X-rated blooms. Now You tell me: What’s a zero hour with no one left to count?
Far away—can you hear it? Static pinging at the edges of thought: the sound a wall makes powering down. Can it be this easy— one misspeak and crowds assemble; the Evil Red Bear lies with the Cowboy and Jericho topples under a jubilant swarm of hammers chiseling for souvenirs? Don’t brood or marvel, just enjoy the music, the death strip lit for photo ops, bananas for all— History doesn’t cough up triumphs easily. Even fear has grown tired of harboring rage and sent it to play out in a desert so far away, no one will notice. . . .
Anywhere. Anyone. Men, boys—but women, too, and Children, babies unborn in the womb. . . .
Sixth Testimony
Every kind of diagnosis, fear fueling rumors as the flowers Germinate and spread, voracious; a purple hemlock Inching trunk to collarbone, jaw to ear to eye. Kisses sicken; loving any body but your own May kill. . . .
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Seventh Testimony
(End of the Soviet Union. Fall of the Berlin Wall. First Gulf War.)
Hubba Bubba Bubble tape, chicken pita wrap to go, Pop Rocks, Push Pops, Dipping Dots BeanieOreos! babies by the handful wool or pleather, felt or straw? Mood rings for internal weather: PageWonderbra!myPalm
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Thank you, GPS! Who wouldn’t want to be a Millionaire. Or a real live Princess or King of the World? Map your genes and pierce your navel— Spice Girl!
[Instrumental Elegy]
Eighth Testimony
Fire up the circuits in your PlayStation— if you’re Game, Boy, I’ll tickle your Elmo; How’s your Tamagotchi been hanging? O, Magic’sMario!vanished from the court, Great Gretzky has exited the ice, Buffy or Baywatch, Cosmo or Xena— Reality GimmeBites.alogo to go with my Windows eBay for old, Amazon for new; A Hubble, a Canon, an Apple a day— and we all shout Yahoo!
(The 90s: an epidemic of greed. Technology takes a leap, news and info accumulation speeds up—“Can I have some more, sir?”)
(9/11, and the war in Iraq.)
Pilot when you’re done; I’ll cut through the traffic mess and pull up curbside in my Saturn
Ninth Testimony
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At least the system seems to be working: you’ve voted, done the counting, and there he stands: America’s miracle, fruit of bold dreams and labor. Ladies and Gents, the unimaginable is open for business! Assemble your buoyant prophesies: Who wouldn’t want to believe in legends again, oblivious to everything except astonishment? Well done; felicitations!
Old MacDonald’s downsized to a flowerpot; Here a body there a body sent packing, caged—everywhere somebody muddied.
(The dark cloud of Donald Trump. The rise of neo-fascism in America. The war on immigrants. The media demonized. “The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” (W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming) The end of honesty and truth. #ME TOO.)
(Barack Obama. Reemergence of the American Dream.)
Tenth Testimony
Oh indolent friends, oh bitter patriots: What have you triggered that can’t be undone?
Welcome to the Age of Babble! Here a twitter, there a tweet; a tiki torch march back to the Good Ol’ Times of mayhem and murder, hollow-points blossoming all over! Everywhere a body bloody; even the earth is bleeding out.
And now the story is yours.
Eleventh Testimony
Granted, it felt good at first to snicker, But now the rooster won’t shut up. How exhausting, waking to that imperious caw.
Surely there can be no more princes— yet here we are, reinventing the magic Year of Love, though the music is scarred and there’s always a war or two going on.
Epilogue
Poems commissioned by Ezriel Kornel and the Friends of Copland House for Susan Graham and Music from Copland House.
© 2019, 2020 Rita Dove. These poems appear in Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove, published by W. W. Norton, 2021.
I didn’t ask to stand under a crown of spikes with my book and my torch, forgotten like the lamp left burning in the corner. My shoulder aches, my toes are throbbing. I’d rather bathe in a park fountain or cast benediction from the shadowy nest of a cathedral’s gilded ribs. Liberty’s pale green maiden, stranded. Come [and] visit! Ascend to the crown and gaze out at the nation I’ve sworn to watch over. I stand ready to tell you what I have seen. Who among you is ready to listen?
Minute by minute another falsehood, another death; hour by hour another firestorm, a stopped breath. Each day an outrage, another spectacle, microbes colonizing the air. How many masks, how many protests, how many sequestered? Which will end first, your shouts or your heart? When it’s finally done, what will you have left to count?
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Twelfth Testimony
(COVID-19. Black Lives Matter. A nation spiraling through fear, splintered by blame.)
(Our standing witness finally identifies herself . . .)
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Richard Danielpour
Grammy Award–winning composer Richard Danielpour is among the most gifted and sought-after composers of his generation. His music has attracted an illustrious array of champions, and, as a devoted mentor and educator, he has also had a significant impact on the younger generation of composers. He has been commissioned by some of the most celebrated artists and ensembles of our day, including YoYo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Frederica von Stade, Thomas Hampson, Anthony McGill, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, the Guarneri and Emerson String Quartets, the New York City, Pacific Northwest and Nashville ballets, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Mariinsky and Vienna chamber orchestras, Orchestre National de France, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Music from Copland House, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. With Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, he created the opera Margaret Garner. He is one of the most-recorded contemporary composers, with many CDs on the Naxos and SONY Classical labels. Among his many honors are two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He was a long-serving faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music and Curtis Institute of Music and is now a professor of music at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music.
Rita Dove
Rita Dove served as United States Poet Laureate (1993–1995), and Virginia Poet Laureate (2004–2006). Born in Akron, Ohio, she was a 1970 Presidential Scholar as one of the hundred top American high school graduates that year and was a graduate of Miami University of Ohio and the University of Iowa (where she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop). Among her many honors are the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Library of Virginia’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, a Chubb Fellowship at Yale University, and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the only poet to have received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts and is the recipient of 27 honorary doctorates. She has authored many poetry collections (including The Yellow House on the Corner , Thomas and Beulah , Grace Notes, On the Bus with Rosa Parks ,
Sonata Mulattica, and her new Playlist for the Apocalypse), a book of short stories (Fifth Sunday), a novel (Through the Ivory Gate), essays under the title The Poet’s World, and a play (The Darker Face of the Earth ) produced at the Kennedy Center, London’s Royal National Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Many composers have set her writing to music, including John Williams, Tania Leon, Bruce Adolphe, Amnon Wolman, Matthew Burtner, and Adolphus Hailstork. She wrote a weekly column, “Poet’s Choice,” for the Washington Post, and has served as editor of the Best American Poetry 2000 , the Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry (2011), and the New York Times magazine’s weekly poetry feature. She has taught extensively and is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove was the featured poet of Emory’s Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series in 2007 and 2016. She was also a featured speaker and guest during Women’s History Month at Emory in 2011 and delivered the keynote address at the 2013 Emory commencement when she received an honorary doctor of letters degree.
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Hailed as “America’s favorite mezzo” (Gramophone) and “an artist to treasure” (New York Times), Susan Graham rose to the highest echelon of international performers within just a few years of her professional debut, mastering an astonishing range of repertoire and genres along the way. Her operatic roles span four centuries—from Monteverdi’s Poppea to Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, written especially for her. A familiar face at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she also maintains a strong international presence. Her earliest operatic successes were in such trouser roles as Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. Her technical expertise soon brought mastery of more virtuosic parts, and she went on to triumph as Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and the Composer in his Ariadne auf Naxos. She sang the leading ladies in the Metropolitan Opera’s world premieres of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby and Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy and made her musical theater debut in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. In concert, she makes regular appearances with the world’s foremost orchestras, often in French repertoire, while her distinguished discography comprises a wealth of opera, orchestral, and solo recordings. Among her numerous honors
Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano
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Music from Copland House (MCH) is the internationally acclaimed, touring resident ensemble based at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home near New York City—an award-winning creative center for American music (coplandhouse.org). Hailed for its “absorbing concert experiences” (Opera News), gathered from its journeys across 150 years of America’s vast musical landscape, MCH champions classic and forgotten voices from the nation’s past, and celebrates today’s established and rising creators of all backgrounds and identities. This singular American repertory ensemble weaves riveting, richly diverse narratives in sound, connecting music to the wider world. It has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR, the European Broadcasting Union, and other major media; and engaged by North America’s foremost concert presenters, including Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, University of Chicago, Smithsonian Institution, and the Caramoor, Bard, Bowdoin, and Ecstatic Festivals. The group, whose varying size and instrumentation are repertory-driven, also presents two mainstage performance series in its home region of Westchester County, New York, and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. MCH can be heard on the Arabesque, Koch International, and Copland House Blend labels, and has commissioned nearly 100 works. Inspired by Copland’s peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, and deeply committed to multifaceted community engagement, the ensemble regularly undertakes a wide variety of educational and other outreach activities. Founded in 1999, MCH boasts a stellar roster of founding, principal, and guest artists—as the Chicago Tribune raved, “Copland would have been proud of all of them.”
Music from Copland House
are a Grammy Award, Opera News Award, and Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year. As one of the foremost exponents of French vocal music, she has also been recognized with the French government’s “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.”
Beginning her illustrious career as the sole Grand Prize flute winner of the renowned Naumburg Competition, Carol Wincenc has concertized on five continents and loves nothing more than “giving back” to communities worldwide. Beloved as a concerto soloist, Grammy Award–winning recording artist, devoted chamber music performer, and professor-mentor to now luminaries in the flute world, she has also
violist Melissa Reardon is artistic director of the Portland (Maine) Chamber Music Festival, artist-in-residence at Bard College and Conservatory, and a co-founder and executive director of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra (ECCO). As a member of the Ensō String Quartet, she toured widely, with performances in Sydney, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center. A sought-after collaborative musician and teacher, she has appeared in numerous festivals around the United States and the world, and has toured with YoYo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and with Musicians from Marlboro. She is married to cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, and they live in New York City with their son Linus.
been the muse for our era’s legendary composers, including Christopher Rouse, Lukas Foss, HK Gorecki, Joan Tower, Jake Heggie, and Tod Machover, among many others.
Violinist Siwoo Kim has performed as soloist with the Houston Symphony, Johannesburg Philharmonic, and Juilliard Orchestra (with which he made his Carnegie Hall concerto debut), and appeared at the Bergen (Norway), Tivoli (Denmark), Stellenbosch (South Africa), Ensemble DITTO (South Korea), and Port de Soller (Spain) festivals. The founding artistic director of the VIVO Music Festival in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, he formed Quartet Senza Misura and spends summers at the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also given the World Premiere of Samuel Adler’s violin concerto, which he recorded for Linn Records, and recently completed a two-year fellowship with Carnegie Hall’s acclaimed Ensemble Grammy-nominatedConnect.
A member of the fabled Dorian Wind Quintet and a co-founder of the acclaimed new music collective counter)induction, clarinetist Benjamin Fingland has toured and recorded with a wide variety of renowned artists, including composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, jazz legend Ornette Coleman, and pop icon Elton John. He performs internationally as a recitalist and soloist, and has also collaborated with Brooklyn Rider, the Horszowski Trio, Ensemble Intercontemporain, International Contemporary Ensemble, and New York New Music Ensemble. A faculty member of the Composers Conference and Bennington Chamber Music Conference, he has appeared with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and served as principal clarinetist of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, Prometheus Chamber Orchestra, and New Haven Symphony.
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Cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach has performed at the Aspen, Bridgehampton, La Musica di Asolo, and Caramoor festivals; Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; and Musicians from Marlboro. A native New Yorker, she has toured widely around the world and recorded with Trio Solisti and the string sextet Concertante (both of which she co-founded). In a versatile career, she has commissioned and premiered countless works; partnered with the Paul Taylor Dance Company and former New York City Ballet principal dancer Damian Woetzel; and performed with conductors Mstislav Rostropovich, James DePreist, Peter Oundjian, and many others.
Lauded in more than 30 countries, pianist and Copland House artistic and executive director Michael Boriskin has performed as soloist with major international orchestras; guest artist with dozens of chamber ensembles; and recitalist at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, BBC, Berlin Radio, Theatre des Champs-Elysees (Paris), Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires), Arnold Schoenberg Center (Vienna), and other leading venues. He has recorded extensively for Naxos, SONY Classical, Harmonia Mundi, New World, Bridge, and other labels, and has been a frequent presence as a performer or commentator on NPR and American Public Media. He has also served as music director of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s fabled White Oak Dance Project, and was a program advisor for the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, United States State Department, Lincoln Center, and other major institutions.
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20TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON
The foundation of the performing arts at Emory began with the vision and gifts of Flora Glenn Candler and came to full fruition in this exquisite venue with the support of Donna and Marvin Schwartz. The 2022–2023 season marks 20 years of world-class performances at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.