Baroque & Beyond: Wachet Auf
Sunday, January 14, 2018
3:00 pm
Chapel of the Cross (historic chapel)
304 E. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill
Baroque & Beyond continues its eleventh season with a program of music built around Wachet Auf by J.S. Bach. The featured baritone is Steven Kimbrough, whose distinguished bio is below. He will be joined by beloved soprano Florence Peacock, who sings the Bach arias and also a cantata by Boismortier, Actéon. Kimbrough will also be heard in a set of songs from a 1736 Bach collection.
The singers are accompanied by a small baroque ensemble: Andrew Bonner, violin; William Thauer, oboe and recorder; Rachel Evans, cello; and Beverly Biggs, harpsichord. This group will be highlighted in two trio sonatas by the prolific Georg Philipp Telemann.
Steven Kimbrough made his operatic debut in 1968 in the role of Marcello in Puccini’s La Bohème at the Teatro Sociale in Mantova, Italy as a winner of the American Opera Auditions. He has appeared in Mannheim, Frankfurt, San Francisco and Philadelphia. He was a member of the Bonn Opera Company in Germany from 1971, where he was for a number of years leading baritone. He appeared in 1989 in Essen as Wozzeck. He made concert tours of the USA, Germany, Italy and Austria. He appeared as a guest at the opera houses of Vancouver and Cincinnati (1983). He has performed on the operatic, concert and musical stages of North and South America, Europe and many other parts of the world including Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Bonn, Torino, London, Barcelona, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro, New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Detroit and Miami. He has sung some forty-four leading baritone roles and his repertoire includes also roles in operettas and musicals.
Kimbrough is well known as a recital and concert singer through many appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and with symphonies in the USA and abroad. He is the foremost interpreter of the “turn-of-the-century” school of Viennese composers (most of whom were effaced by Hitler’s Third Reich), as is demonstrated by his many highly praised recordings. He has presented in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere a recital of their songs under the title “Forbidden Composers.”
Steven Kimbrough is an internationally known protagonist of contemporary opera and has appeared in twenty-two world premieres of operas including Christophorus by Schreker in Freiburg in 1978; Siegfried Matthus’ Count Mirabeau at the opera house in Essen, Germany. At the Teatro Regio in Torino, Italy he sang the first Italian-language performances of Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, and he performed the German premiere of Zemlinsky’s Op. 20, Symphonic Songs (Africa Sings, African-American poets in song) with Dennis Russell Davies and the Beethovenhalle Orchester Bonn in Bonn, Germany.
Steven Kimbrough has been described as “a remarkable singer, with a cultivated, easily flowing baritone of fine quality and a rare command of words and rhythms” (The New Yorker), and a “master of vocal art” (La Stampa, Rome). His voice has been praised as “magnificent” (Journal de Genève), “mellow, dramatic, elegant” (The New York Times), and “pure liquid gold” (The Birmingham Post Herald).
Among his many recordings for EMI (Electrola), CBS (Columbia), Acanta/Pilz, Capriccio, Arabesque, Koch/ Schwann two CD’s of these composers’ German art songs (Alexander Zemlinsky and Erich Wolfgang Korngold) received nominations by Ovation magazine as “Best Vocal Record of the Year.” He has collaborated with the distinguished pianist Dalton Baldwin on a number of recordings.
Tickets are $18 and will be available at the door. Suggested parking includes the adjacent Planetarium lot and the nearby Rosemary Street parking garage.
PROGRAM
Telemann Trio Sonata TWV 42:B1
Four Bach songs
Boismortier Actéon
Telemann Trio Sonata TWV 42:d10
Bach – Wachet Auf