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DPU School of Music pays NEH funds forward with free premiere
If your New Year’s resolution is to pay it forward, the DePauw University School of Music is with you.
Thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the school is sharing the wealth with free tickets this weekend to the premiere of Music Unwound’s “Change the World, It needs it! A Weill/Brecht/Blitzstein Cabaret” conceived by Joseph Horowitz and Kim Kowalke and starring guest vocalists Lisa Vroman and William Sharp.
All four contributing artists are currently visiting DePauw as part of the campuswide interdisciplinary festival “Cultural Connections: Weill and Brecht.” While here to work with students on an upcoming production of Kurt Weill’s “Broadway” opera Street Scene (Feb. 9-12), they are also premiering an intimate cabaret-style performance at the Green Center.
Due to demand, the performance, originally booked in the GCPA’s Kerr Theatre, has been moved to a larger venue and will now take place in two performances on Saturday, Jan. 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 15 at 3 p.m. in Thompson Recital Hall.
The German-born Weill (1900-1950), the leading theatrical composer of his generation, has been a focus of the yearlong interdisciplinary festival. Among his works in the cabaret will be musical numbers from “Street Scene” and “Knickerbocker Holiday.”
The program, which runs 75 minutes with no intermission, also includes several selections from Weill and Brecht’s “Three Penny Opera” with English translations by Marc Blitzstein.
Guest soprano Lisa Vroman, one of America’s most versatile voices, has starred on Broadway, and in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as Christine Daaé in “The Phantom of the Opera”; played Laurey in Oklahoma (BBC PROMS); Mary Turner in “Of Thee I Sing” (San Francisco Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas); and sang and danced opposite Dick Van Dyke as Mary Poppins at the Hollywood Bowl.
Her Broadway debut was in Aspects of Love, and she was the first to play both Fantine and Cosette in “Les Misérables.” She is a frequent guest with orchestras including Philadelphia, Dallas, Nashville, St. Louis, Houston, Atlanta, Hong Kong, Cleveland, National, Boston Pops and New York Pops, as well as with the New York Festival of Song (Carnegie Hall).
Her PBS performance as Johanna in “Sweeney Todd,” garnered an Emmy Award in 2001.
Baritone William Sharp, a veteran of the opera world, is currently a member of the Peabody Conservatory of Music faculty. He has appeared with most major American symphony orchestras, including those of New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His world premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein’s last major work, “Arias and Barcarolles,” won a Grammy Award, and he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Performance for his recording featuring the works of American composers Virgil Thomson, John Musto and Lee Hoiby. He has been heard as a soloist at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Carnegie Hall in New York City, and he is a winner of the Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition, as well as the Geneva International Competition.
Co-contributor and guest musicologist Kim Kowalke, who is visiting DePauw from the Eastman School of Music, is considered the world’s leading expert on Weill. He is president of the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York City and a five-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music.
A pioneer in music programming and author of ten books on subjects of classical music in the United States, Horowitz, a return visitor and recipient of an honorary doctoral degree from DePauw, is the producer of the Music Unwound series, which previously presented the “Dvorak in America” festival at DePauw in 2014.
His books include “Understanding Toscanini “(1987), which was named a best book of the year by the National Book Critics Circle; both “Classical Music in America: A History” (2005) and “Artists in Exile” (2008) were named best books of the year by The Economist.
The free tickets to the Music Unwound Cabaret can be obtained online at music.depauw.edu, or in person, at the door, beginning one hour before each performance.