Saturday, May 12, 2018 / Isabel Bayrakdarian, Soprano and St. Lawrence String Quartet / CAMA's Masterseries at The Lobero Theatre, 8:00 PM

More documents

Info

celebrated for her beauty, presence, and style as for a strikingly multihued voice that’s wholly in sync with the rest of her. A winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions—the same year she graduated from the University of Toronto cum laude with a Biomedical Engineering Degree—Ms. Bayrakdarian thereafter found her career taking rapid wing. She scored a notable success in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s world premiere production of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge; the following year, she walked away from Plácido Domingo’s prestigious Operalia competition with first prize. More debuts followed, including her San Francisco Opera debut, as Valencienne in The Merry Widow, and her Metropolitan Opera debut, in the New York premiere of Bolcom’s opera; a season later, she won plaudits as Teresa in the Met premiere of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Mozart became a specialty: Zerlina in Don Giovanni (New York, Houston, Salzburg), Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro (Los Angeles, London), and Pamina in The Magic Flute (New York, Toronto). Her roles at Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company range from Gluck’s Euridice to Debussy’s Mélisande to Poulenc’s Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites; and away from Canada, she has shone as Monteverdi’s Poppea in Barcelona, Handel’s Romilda (Serse) in Dresden, and Janáček’s Vixen in New York, Florence, and the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. But opera is only one page of the Bayrakdarian résumé. An ever-active concertizer, she’s appeared with the premier orchestras of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, RAI Torino, Paris, London, Vienna, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal under the baton of such eminent conductors as Seiji Ozawa, James Conlon, David Zinman, Michael Tilson Thomas, Alan Gilbert, Nicholas McGegan, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Colin Davis, Sir Andrew Davis, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss Jansons, Leonard Slatkin, James Levine, Anne Manson, Bramwell Tovey, Peter Oundjian and Richard Bradshaw. Her versatility is also reflected in being the featured vocalist on the Grammy® Award-winning soundtrack of the blockbuster film The Two Towers from The Lord of The Rings trilogy and on the soundtrack of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat. A trance music collaboration with the electronica band Delerium garnered yet another Grammy nomination. She sings on the BBC-produced short film HOLOCAUST - A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz, as well as her Gemini-nominated film Long Journey Home, documenting her first visit to her ancestral homeland Armenia. Bayrakdarian is the winner of four consecutive Juno Awards for Best Classical Album, and her latest recording, Mother of Light, was nominated for a 2018 Juno Award. Her recordings with orchestra include Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 with John Axelrod conducting the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, released on the Sony Classical label, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, with Michael Tilson- Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony, and Respighi’s Il Tramonto with Orchestre Symphonique de Laval. She is also the recipient of many awards, including the Marilyn Horne 6
Foundation Competition Award, Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee and the Diamond Jubilee Medals, the Arbor Award from the University of Toronto, the George London Foundation Award, Canada Council’s Virginia Parker Prize, and the Republic Of Armenia “Komitas Medal”. Most recently, she was awarded the “Movses Khorenatsi” medal - the Republic of Armenia’s highest cultural award. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, and an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Conservatory of Music. Ms. Bayrakdarian is on the Voice Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). NOTES on the PROGRAM By Howard Posner When Ottorino Respighi composed Il Tramonto in 1914, he had been living in Rome for about a year, teaching composition at the Liceo Musicale di S Cecilia and still finding his own voice as a composer, which was no small search in the days before World War I. The world of art music was fragmenting into strains that bore so little resemblance to each other that there was no longer even rough agreement about what music should sound like. Il Tramonto came A winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions—the same year she graduated from the University of Toronto cum laude with a Biomedical Engineering Degree—Isabel Bayrakdarian thereafter found her career taking rapid wing. within four years after such radically different works as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1910), Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony (1911), Der Rosenkavalier (1910), Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), and Puccini’s Fanciulla del West (1910). Respighi was more a traditionalist than a modernist, and the voice that emerged took note of most contemporary trends but was tuneful and accessible. Respighi was drawn to the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley during these years. He would eventually compose elaborate settings of five Shelley poems. He illustrates “The Sunset,” a poem about the triumph of death over love, with a sort of impressionistic drifting tonality. The strings supply much of the melodic interest, often in sweeping lines of considerable range, while the soprano sings simple lines that stay largely within an octave, stressing the words. Qohelet (usually spelled Kohelet) is the Hebrew title of the Biblical book better known by its Latinized Greek title, Ecclesiastes. The Hebrew word means literally “gatherer” or “assembler” but may be meant in the sense of “teacher.” A collection of worldly observations, often skeptical or fatalistic, it is traditionally attributed to King Solomon on its own authority—it begins, “The words of Kohelet son of David, king in Jerusalem”—but most scholars think it was written much later. The book is a literary masterpiece 7
Page 1 and 2: Presenting the world’s finest cla
Page 3 and 4: MASTERSERIES SEASON SPONSORSHIP: ES
Page 5 and 6: masterseries at The Lobero Theatre
Page 7: ©Bo Huang/bohuang.ca Established i
Page 11 and 12: New York in 1940, he shared an apar
Page 13 and 14: TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS OTTORINO RES
Page 15 and 16: LEONARD BERNSTEIN “A Julia de Bur
Page 17 and 18: CARLOS GARDEL: “Por una Cabeza”
Page 19 and 20: CARLOS GARDEL: “Volver” Music b
Page 21 and 22: “Che Tango Che” Tu m’avais d
Page 23 and 24: “Youkali (Tango Habanera)” Et l
Page 25 and 26: FARID AL-ATRASH “Ya Zahratan Fee
Page 27 and 28: Recognition and Benefits of Sponsor
Page 29 and 30: Presenting the world’s finest cla
Page 31 and 32: MOZART SOCIETY conductor’s circle
Page 33 and 34: MUSICIANS SOCIETY Your annual gift

Saturday, May 12, 2018 / Isabel Bayrakdarian, Soprano and St. Lawrence String Quartet / CAMA's Masterseries at The Lobero Theatre, 8:00 PM

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?