Contemporary Art Song Recital

Pianist Yonit Kosovske and mezzo soprano Julie Comparini perform an Art Song recital of two song cycles: Games by Ian Wilson, and Poems of Love & The Rain by Ned Rorem.

The performance in Bremen, Germany featured projections of photo collages from the series Inferno by Piet Wessing.

Ned Rorem's thirty-minute song cycle Poems of Love and the Rain takes us on a round-trip poetic journey by way of a palindrome. Rorem writes: "I selected poems by several American authors and set each one to music twice, in as contrasting a manner as possible … And the order chosen for these seventeen songs is 'pyramidal': the sequence works toward the Interlude, then backtracks — as in a mirror." The poems “deal principally with requited love against a backdrop of constant rain” and the cycle "tells no story per se; it seeks rather to sustain a uniform mood with as much variety as the terms of this mood permit — with an occasional flash of light through the black cloud."

Games is a thirty-minute song cycle on texts by Vasko Popa (1922–1991), one of Serbia's (formerly Yugoslavia) greatest poets. Popa fought as a Partisan during World War II and spent time imprisoned in a German concentration camp. A decade after the war ended, Popa's poem cycle “Games” was published in 1956 as part of his collection “Unrest-Field.” Ian Wilson's song cycle, premiered in 2004, reflects on these poems, to which he felt inspired to set to music. Wilson writes: “To me, these surrealist texts, superficially about strange and uncomfortable games, are very likely a way of processing and reflecting on his war-time experiences.”