Liederabend 1

I'm putting together a song recital for a very special audience — my hometown, my parents, relatives, high school teachers, classmates, neighbors.
The kind of audience and venue you will have determines the sort of repertoire you offer. On one hand, I want the program to reflect my own experience and tastes, to show what I do best. On the other it needs to appeal to the audience. If the recital were at an university or as part of an arts series, then I could do pretty much anything and they would rise to the challenge. But my audience will be a real mixed bag, some people who know something or two about music, some who don't.

The recital will be held in a local church, so we need to keep the trustees happy — they, after all, OK'd the performance without asking for many details in advance. There is a great amount of sacred song literature out there, but not all of it fits a recital, at least not in large quantities, if you ask me. The good stuff — say, Bach, or Barbers "Hermit Songs" — requires a bit more rehearsal effort than my accompanist and I have time to work in, and besides, we want to have a good time ourselves, especially since we are going to do this for free, during our vacations!

So, what we have: a mezzo-soprano living in Austria, performing for her American hometown. Korngold came up right away, as an enjoyable, melodic bridge from one country to the next: a Viennese Wunderkind who'd already been working on a film score in Hollywood when the Anschluss hit, thereby sealing his fate as the creator of a new kind Hollywood film music, winning Oscars for his scores for "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Anthony Adverse". He continued writing "serious" music for the rest of his life, but musical tastes had changed radically after the war, and he never the regained the success and respect he'd had in his youth. His music started coming back into vogue around the 90s, however, and some of his truly beautiful songs with both German and English texts (composed for the Max Reinhardt Workshop in Los Angeles, first sung by... Nanette Fabray!) will work nicely as a group on the program.