One of America’s most influential composers of the second half of the 20th century and the winner of Pulitzer and Grammy awards, George Crumb used avant-garde techniques and a remarkable ear for color to create music that sounds like no one else’s, and yet is alluringly accessible. Born into a musical family and living for decades in rural Pennsylvania, he found himself fascinated by the sounds of the forest near his home. “I love sounds that seem to hang in the air, and you can’t tell where they’re coming from,” he once said. He experimented with both electronic instruments and extended techniques on acoustic instruments to reveal uncanny timbral combinations dense with emotional resonances.

Written in 1979 for the renowned mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, Apparition sets a portion of Walt Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which mourns Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 and the hundreds of thousands killed in the Civil War. In addition, “Lilacs” explores the subject of death and its inevitability in human life in a section called “Death Carol.”

Apparition is a cycle of six songs and three wordless vocalises that challenges the virtuosity of both singer and pianist. Especially powerful is Crumb’s use of piano, whose amplification captures both delicate sounds and thunderous effects as the texts dictate. Extending the sound palette, the pianist often plays within the instrument’s body by plucking and strumming the strings directly. We hear this in the first song, “The Night in Silence Under Many a Star,” in which the pianist introduces a deep, cavernous tolling under zither-like brushed and strummed strings. This song conjures the image of Death as a comforting mother, rocking her child on a gently rolling sea.

Two of the virtuosic vocalises are filled with the delicate chirping and singing of birds (representing Whitman’s hermit thrush, singer of the “Death Carol”). However, the violently percussive second vocalise and its successive “Approach Strong Deliveress” offer a contrasting image of Death as a mighty warrior bringing emancipation. After the culminating acceptance of Death in “Come Lovely and Soothing Death,” Crumb reprises the opening “The Night in Silence,” with only minor changes, to complete the cycle. Writes William Bland: “In Whitman’s verse, death is never depicted as an ending of life. Instead, it is circular, always a beginning or an enriched return to a universal life-force.”

© Janet Bedell, 2025

For more than 60 years, Clara Schumann reigned as the “Queen of the Piano” of 19th-century music. Franz Liszt praised her “complete technical mastery, depth and sincerity of feeling.”

Unlike Gustav Mahler, who notoriously suppressed his wife’s talents as a composer, Robert Schumann supported his spouse’s creative work. When Robert embarked on his mania for songwriting in the early 1840s, Clara followed suit. For their first Christmas together in 1840, she gave him three songs; they included two on this program, “Volkslied” and “Ihr Bildnis.” Along with “Sie liebte sich beiden,” (composed 1840-43) they are settings of verse by Heinrich Heine, the darkly ironic German writer.

Often ambivalent about her work, Schumann never published “Volkslied.” Its brooding piano introduction and postlude eloquently express the bleak tale of young lovers who elope, but encounter disaster in an unforgiving world. Equally bitter is “Sie liebten sich beide” about a couple who secretly loved each other but never admitted it. Schumann’s piano and vocal lines capture their suppressed feelings in a series of yearning dissonances. Most beautiful of the songs is “Ihr Bildnis,” also published posthumously. In a dream, the bereaved lover gazes at a portrait of the woman he’d loved, who seems to come to life before his eyes. Schumann superbly captures the sting of his loss by leaving his last phrase on an unresolved harmony, completed by a moving postlude.

© Janet Bedell, 2025

For more than 60 years, Clara Schumann reigned as the “Queen of the Piano” of 19th-century music. Franz Liszt praised her “complete technical mastery, depth and sincerity of feeling.”

Unlike Gustav Mahler, who notoriously suppressed his wife’s talents as a composer, Robert Schumann supported his spouse’s creative work. When Robert embarked on his mania for songwriting in the early 1840s, Clara followed suit. For their first Christmas together in 1840, she gave him three songs; they included two on this program, “Volkslied” and “Ihr Bildnis.” Along with “Sie liebte sich beiden,” (composed 1840-43) they are settings of verse by Heinrich Heine, the darkly ironic German writer.

Often ambivalent about her work, Schumann never published “Volkslied.” Its brooding piano introduction and postlude eloquently express the bleak tale of young lovers who elope, but encounter disaster in an unforgiving world. Equally bitter is “Sie liebten sich beide” about a couple who secretly loved each other but never admitted it. Schumann’s piano and vocal lines capture their suppressed feelings in a series of yearning dissonances. Most beautiful of the songs is “Ihr Bildnis,” also published posthumously. In a dream, the bereaved lover gazes at a portrait of the woman he’d loved, who seems to come to life before his eyes. Schumann superbly captures the sting of his loss by leaving his last phrase on an unresolved harmony, completed by a moving postlude.

© Janet Bedell, 2025

For more than 60 years, Clara Schumann reigned as the “Queen of the Piano” of 19th-century music. Franz Liszt praised her “complete technical mastery, depth and sincerity of feeling.”

Unlike Gustav Mahler, who notoriously suppressed his wife’s talents as a composer, Robert Schumann supported his spouse’s creative work. When Robert embarked on his mania for songwriting in the early 1840s, Clara followed suit. For their first Christmas together in 1840, she gave him three songs; they included two on this program, “Volkslied” and “Ihr Bildnis.” Along with “Sie liebte sich beiden,” (composed 1840-43) they are settings of verse by Heinrich Heine, the darkly ironic German writer.

Often ambivalent about her work, Schumann never published “Volkslied.” Its brooding piano introduction and postlude eloquently express the bleak tale of young lovers who elope, but encounter disaster in an unforgiving world. Equally bitter is “Sie liebten sich beide” about a couple who secretly loved each other but never admitted it. Schumann’s piano and vocal lines capture their suppressed feelings in a series of yearning dissonances. Most beautiful of the songs is “Ihr Bildnis,” also published posthumously. In a dream, the bereaved lover gazes at a portrait of the woman he’d loved, who seems to come to life before his eyes. Schumann superbly captures the sting of his loss by leaving his last phrase on an unresolved harmony, completed by a moving postlude.

© Janet Bedell, 2025

As both a woman and an African American, Florence Price was a dual pioneer in American classical music at a time when there were formidable obstacles for both groups. Born and raised in Little Rock, she graduated with honors from New England Conservatory and eventually settled in Chicago. There she became friends with writer Langston Hughes and the great contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom helped promote her composing career. In 1933, her Symphony in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony, the first composition by an African American woman to be played by a major American orchestra.

Over the course of her career, Price wrote some 300 pieces in a variety of genres. Her songs and spiritual arrangements were in heavy demand in Chicago during her lifetime; Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, and later soprano Leontyne Price programmed them. But after her death in 1953, Price’s music was largely forgotten. Its rediscovery began earlier this century when new owners of her summer home found a plethora of unpublished works. Their release has sparked a Florence Price revival as musicians and audiences have embraced her music.

“Because” sets the words of the first African American poet and novelist to win broad fame in America: Paul Laurence Dunbar. Despite the brevity of his life, Dunbar, the son of slaves, wrote prolifically and achieved an international reputation. Price gave his verses music of powerful simplicity, inspired by the traditional melodic style of spirituals. Because of their friendship, she often set poems by Langston Hughes, and we’ll hear the fervent “Hold Fast to Dreams” (composed 1945), spun over a rapturous piano accompaniment.

A deeply religious woman, Price wrote “Adoration” in 1951 as a devotional piece for the organ. It has subsequently been arranged for other instruments, and we’ll hear it transcribed as a wordless vocalise. 

© Janet Bedell, 2025

As both a woman and an African American, Florence Price was a dual pioneer in American classical music at a time when there were formidable obstacles for both groups. Born and raised in Little Rock, she graduated with honors from New England Conservatory and eventually settled in Chicago. There she became friends with writer Langston Hughes and the great contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom helped promote her composing career. In 1933, her Symphony in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony, the first composition by an African American woman to be played by a major American orchestra.

Over the course of her career, Price wrote some 300 pieces in a variety of genres. Her songs and spiritual arrangements were in heavy demand in Chicago during her lifetime; Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, and later soprano Leontyne Price programmed them. But after her death in 1953, Price’s music was largely forgotten. Its rediscovery began earlier this century when new owners of her summer home found a plethora of unpublished works. Their release has sparked a Florence Price revival as musicians and audiences have embraced her music.

“Because” sets the words of the first African American poet and novelist to win broad fame in America: Paul Laurence Dunbar. Despite the brevity of his life, Dunbar, the son of slaves, wrote prolifically and achieved an international reputation. Price gave his verses music of powerful simplicity, inspired by the traditional melodic style of spirituals. Because of their friendship, she often set poems by Langston Hughes, and we’ll hear the fervent “Hold Fast to Dreams” (composed 1945), spun over a rapturous piano accompaniment.

A deeply religious woman, Price wrote “Adoration” in 1951 as a devotional piece for the organ. It has subsequently been arranged for other instruments, and we’ll hear it transcribed as a wordless vocalise. 

© Janet Bedell, 2025

As both a woman and an African American, Florence Price was a dual pioneer in American classical music at a time when there were formidable obstacles for both groups. Born and raised in Little Rock, she graduated with honors from New England Conservatory and eventually settled in Chicago. There she became friends with writer Langston Hughes and the great contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom helped promote her composing career. In 1933, her Symphony in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony, the first composition by an African American woman to be played by a major American orchestra.

Over the course of her career, Price wrote some 300 pieces in a variety of genres. Her songs and spiritual arrangements were in heavy demand in Chicago during her lifetime; Anderson, tenor Roland Hayes, and later soprano Leontyne Price programmed them. But after her death in 1953, Price’s music was largely forgotten. Its rediscovery began earlier this century when new owners of her summer home found a plethora of unpublished works. Their release has sparked a Florence Price revival as musicians and audiences have embraced her music.

© Janet Bedell, 2025

Among the most rarely performed of Brahms’s lieder are the five epigrammatic songs known as the Ophelia Lieder. Written in 1873, they were commissioned by Brahms’s friend the actor Josef Lewinsky, who was performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Prague that year. August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s outstanding translations of Shakespeare’s plays had made them very popular in German-speaking countries from the 19th century onward. 

In Act IV, Hamlet features a heartbreaking scene in which Ophelia, Hamlet’s jilted fiancée, goes mad after he abandoned her and then killed her father. Before the horrified members of the  Danish court, Ophelia sings this series of disjointed song fragments, which chaotically mix laments for her father  with bawdy lyrics inspired by her unhappy affair with Hamlet.

Lewinsky asked Brahms to set Shakespeare’s songs for his fiancée Olga Preicheisen, who was playing Ophelia in the Prague production. A lover of traditional folk songs, Brahms chose this style for his poignant settings, which mirror Ophelia’s crazed innocence. Most of them are less than a minute long. Providing the simplest of piano accompaniments, Brahms probably intended them to be sung a cappella. This usually expansive composer succeeded in creating touching, wonderfully expressive melodies with very few notes.

© Janet Bedell, 2025

Born on the coast of Brittany, French composer Rita Strohl’s refined, often mystical music is only recently being rediscovered. A contemporary of Debussy and like him deeply influenced by the French symbolist poets of the early 20th century, she was a gifted pianist who attended the Paris Conservatoire. Though a mother of four, she rebelled against conventional domestic life, following the example of her mother Élodie La Villette, an acclaimed painter. Strohl pursued her musical and literary interests with unswerving devotion.

Strohl wrote many chamber works and some symphonic works, but won most attention for her songs setting symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire. As a symbolist composer, her musical settings emphasized the words, allowing them to dictate the form and harmonic coloring each song would use, while the piano subtly explored their inner meanings. Published in 1901, Dix poésies mises en musique—“Ten Poems Put into Music”—exactly defines Strohl’s intentions.

Baudelaire’s verse dominates the cycle; “La Tristesse de la lune” (“Sadness of the Moon”) anthropomorphizes the moon as a beautiful, dreaming woman who sends teardrops into the hand of the poet as inspiration. The other two on today’s program, “Barcarolle” and “La Momie,” are by a lesser-known symbolist Achille Segard. Especially fine is “La Momie” (“The Mummy”), Strohl’s tender song about an Egyptian mummy: a little girl now ruthlessly exposed to the eyes of curious museumgoers. 

© Janet Bedell, 2025

Rarely are we privileged to hear what a composer of advanced age has to say to us. But Richard Strauss produced some of his most remarkable works after 75. His last message to the world was the sublime Four Last Songs, written when he was 84. They combine consummate craft with the serene, otherworldly vision of a man who loves life but sees approaching death as a blessing.

At the end of World War II, Strauss and his wife of more than 50 years, Pauline, found themselves in limbo. In 1933 Strauss had incautiously accepted an official musical post under the newly installed Nazi government, and although he was fired 18 months later and spent the war years on Hitler’s persona non grata list, he was charged as a suspected Nazi collaborator. In 1948 while composing the Four Last Songs, he was absolved by the De-Nazification Board. In the meanwhile, he was not allowed to work in Germany or collect royalties. However, since he and Pauline were in frail health, they were permitted to go into exile in Switzerland while his case was being considered.

When the composer’s son Franz visited his parents in Montreux, he found Strauss deeply depressed. Reportedly, Franz told his father: “Papa, stop writing letters and brooding, it does no good. Write a few nice songs instead.” The suggestion struck a spark. Strauss had already been musing over the poem “Im Abendrot” (at sunset) by Joseph Eichendorff; its description of an old couple who have shared years of “Not und Freude” (need and joy) and now contemplate death in a strange land mirrored his and Pauline’s situation. And an admirer had sent him a book of poems by Hermann Hesse, winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature; he selected three poems to set: “Frühling” (spring), “September,” and “Beim schlafengehen” (going to sleep).

The first song, “Frühling,” stands apart from the others in its youthful ecstasy: a remembrance of the glories of springs past, with soaring melismas. “September” was the last song Strauss composed. It shows the old master of ingenious orchestration in top form, with glistening rain drops at the beginning and an autumnal instrumental solo at the end. A deepening sense of weariness pervades “Beim Schlafengehen”: a longing for death, the ultimate sleep. “Im Abendrot” was the first song composed in this cycle, but it makes a fitting valedictory. The text is set with great simplicity as though Strauss was speaking quietly to his wife. Magical trills describe two larks flying overhead. At the end they return, higher still—voices from beyond this world.

© Janet Bedell, 2025