by Courtney Ruckman | Nov 30, 2023 | 2024-2025 Season
“Hankey’s performance is the stand-out in this show–her singing is lovely, but her acting also is visceral, embodying both loneliness and terror vividly.” Julia Goldberg, Santa Fe Reporter SAMANTHA HANKEY, mezzo sopranoMYRA HUANG, pianist TUESDAY, JANUARY 14,...
by Courtney Ruckman | Nov 28, 2023 | Blog
Gerald Perman, our beloved Founder, subscribed to the theory that Washington audiences had short memories; if a singer therefore presented a notably successful debut recital here, his oft-repeated mantra was, “We have to bring them back right away,” ideally intended...
by Courtney Ruckman | Nov 28, 2023 | Blog
Let us pay tribute to Renée Fleming on the occasion of her well-deserved 2023 Kennedy Center Honors Award by traveling back over three decades to her first Vocal Arts DC recital at an exciting moment in the soprano’s burgeoning career. In January 1992, Fleming gave...
by Courtney Ruckman | Oct 2, 2023 | Blog
I wonder whether the reason our second commission—Gregory Spears’ song cycle Walden, to verses by Henry David Thoreau—has such a special place in my heart is because its birth was so difficult. I can’t objectively know. Yet its message of simplicity in all things,...
by Courtney Ruckman | Aug 31, 2023 | Blog
On December 15, 1822, poet Wilhelm Müller penned a gracious letter to composer Bernhard Klein after discovering Klein published two settings of his poems. He wrote, “My songs lead but a half life, a paper life of black and white…until music breathes life into them, or...
