A survey of some past performance projects that I have conceptualized, researched, designed, programmed, written, and performed.
“A Stranger I Arrived, A Stranger I Departed:”: Winterreise in Poetry and Song
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, March and April 2018.
With its themes of alienation, exile, obsession, and lost love, Franz Schubert’s great 19th-century song cycle Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) speaks to our current social and political moment in moving and startling ways. Six Pittsburgh poets (Lori Jakiela, Sheila Carter-Jones, Adriana E. Ramirez, Sheila Squillante, Jenny Ashburn, Don Wentworth) give readings of new work responding to each song in the cycle, along with live performances of the corresponding songs by baritone Daniel Teadt and pianist Benjamin Binder.
The project unfolded over three evenings in locations across Pittsburgh:
13 March 2018: City of Asylum, Pittsburgh’s home for writers and artists in exile
29 March 2018: Brillobox, a Warhol-inspired retro-chic bar in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh
15 April 2018: PNC Recital Hall at Duquesne University (including a complete uninterrupted performance of the cycle)
The Art of Cabaret
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 14 January 2017.
A relaxed nightclub atmosphere pervades this evening of cabaret, where every song tells a story and the fourth wall has a tendency to disappear. Songs by composers from the cabaret, classical, musical theater, and pop worlds all rub shoulders in an entertaining mélange of intimate confession and cheeky provocation.
In the first half, we explore songs from the first three great eras of cabaret: late-19th-century Paris, Weimar-era Berlin, and mid-20th-century New York City. In the second half, we present a contemporary cabaret on a timeless theme: love and relationships.
The cabaret includes by Steven Sondheim, Kurt Weill, William Bolcom, Marc Blitzstein, Randy Newman, Tom Lehrer, and many others, including selections from the American Songbook and rarely-heard gems from the history of cabaret, all sung in English.
With Liza Forrester Kelly, mezzo-soprano; Daniel Teadt, baritone; Benjamin Binder, piano.
Researched, programmed, and scripted by Benjamin Binder (with help from Liza Forrester Kelly and Daniel Teadt in second half)
Shakespeare in Song, Song in Shakespeare
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 10 November 2016.
In an informative and engaging lecture recital honoring the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, we explore the role of music and song in Shakespeare's work through an incredible variety of song settings of Shakespeare's texts by composers from his own time up to the present day.
For this concert, we are joined on stage by Shakespeare scholar Dr. Joseph M. Ortiz, a professor at the University of Texas-El Paso and the author of Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music. Joseph is a wonderfully talented and accessible speaker whose fascinating insights into Shakespeare's song lyrics make the songs on the program even more meaningful. Composers include Haydn, Schubert, Britten, Finzi, Korngold, Vaughan Williams, and many others, including a treat from Pittsburgh's own Stephen Foster.
With Jen Aylmer, soprano; Alexander Hurd, baritone; Benjamin Binder, piano.
A Folk Song Fantasy
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 24 January 2015.
"Song composition is today sailing along so false a course that one cannot sufficiently remind oneself of the ideal: and that for me is the folksong." So said Johannes Brahms in 1860, and he wasn't alone. Ever since the genre of art song began, poets and composers have returned over and over again to the rich tradition of folk song for inspiration. Folk song holds out the promise of a pure and untainted connection to the origins of song itself. Folk song is supposed to be true, authentic, and real - it's supposed to express the essence of a people. And yet in reality, art song poets and composers did something much more than simply copy or imitate what they believed to be the folk song tradition of their people. Instead, they transformed that material into songs that conjure up a powerful and enchanting fantasy of folk life.
Repertoire:
• George Butterworth's settings of poems from A.E. Housman's touching poetic collection A Shropshire Lad, depicting the joys and sorrows of English country life just before the outbreak of World War I
• Manuel de Falla's Seven Popular Songs, passionate and inventive arrangements of Spanish folk tunes that evoke the world of flamenco music and dance
• Tennessee Williams' Blue Mountain Ballads, blues-inspired lyrics from the Deep South set to music by the American expat Paul Bowles
• Four Songs of the Auvergne, ancient tunes from the Occitania region of southern France in sumptuous musical arrangements by the Impressionist Joseph Canteloube
• Five magnificent settings of German folk songs and poems by Johannes Brahms
With Liza Forrester Kelly, mezzo-soprano; Daniel Teadt, baritone; Benjamin Binder, piano.
Looking to the East: Orientalism in Song
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 20 September 2014
With Sari Gruber, soprano; Joe Dan Harper, tenor
In our increasingly globalized world, it seems like East and West have never been more interested in each other. Just think about how the rise of China and political turmoil in the Arab world have inspired the West to learn more about those Eastern cultures. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fascination with the East was just as strong, but without the guidance of television or the internet, much was left up to the imagination. European song composers and poets filled that void with sumptuous melodic evocations of those faraway lands and peoples. In their songs, the East became an exotic and colorful realm where one could taste of forbidden pleasures, even as danger lurked around every corner. This concert explores the East of myth and dream as conjured up by Western artists.
Repertoire:
• Franz Schubert's exquisite settings of poems inspired by the ancient Persian poets Rumi and Hafis
• The wry and picturesque Chinese Poems by the world-traveling composer Albert Roussel, a contemporary of the musical Impressionists
• The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's sensual and scandalous Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin
• A group of French songs by the likes of Georges Bizet, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns meant to conjure a world of romance and intrigue on the sands of the Sahara
Insatiable Love: Songs for Valentine’s Day
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 14 February 2014.
When you think of Valentine's Day, does your heart melt? Or does your blood boil? Either way, this Valentine's Day concert will leave you very satisfied. In songs by Benjamin Britten, Hugo Wolf, and Robert Schumann, we explore the ups and the downs of love: sensual ecstasy, tender intimacy, exploded delusion, vindictive jealousy, flirtatious intrigue, and all the rest of it.
Repertoire:
Benjamin Britten: Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, op. 22
Britten, On This Island, op. 11
Hugo Wolf: Selections from Mörike-Lieder
Robert Schumann: Duets for Tenor and Soprano, op. 34
Joseph Gaines, tenor; Benjamin Binder, piano.
Laura Knoop Very, soprano; Karen Roethlisberger Verm, piano.
La Belle Époque Cabaret
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 27 July 2012.
In a fully theatrical production commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art to complement its exhibit Impressionism in a New Light: From Monet to Stieglitz, we conjure up the musical and cultural worlds of late 19th-century Paris that inspired the Impressionists. The larger-than-life cabaret impresario Aristide Bruant (portrayed by tenor Rob Frankenberry) is your guide as we explore songs and arias from the music hall, café-concert, cabaret, opera house, and drawing room, including comedic monologues and satirical skits from the period. The repertoire includes rare gems of the French popular music repertoire by Bruant, Yvette Guilbert, Xanrof, and others, sung in world-premiere English translations prepared for this performance by Emily Hipchen and Anne Gaquere. Projections of artwork and translated song lyrics complete the transformation of the museum’s foyer into a resplendent Parisian music hall.
With Olga Perez Flora, mezzo-soprano; Joseph Gaines, tenor; Benjamin Binder, piano.
Researched, programmed, and scripted by Benjamin Binder.
Illuminations: Music, Poetry, and Art
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 12 May 2011.
The Carnegie Museum of Art and the Pittsburgh Song Collaborative team up to take a fresh look at the similarities between music, poetry, and art in a concert of classical art songs creatively juxtaposed with works of art from the museum’s collection. Rather than simply pair visual art with the music and poetry of each song, PSC performers and Museum of Art staff team up for a novel approach, using visual projection and engaging commentary to allow the audience to discover deeper, more stimulating resonances between the three forms of art. An art lover who adores the paintings of Van Gogh, Bonnard, or Cézanne will discover the same expressive designs and compositional strategies explored in the poetry of Goethe, Baudelaire, or Joyce, as it was set to music by composers such as Schubert, Debussy, and Barber. Audience members may come to the concert to enjoy their favorite art form, but they will leave with a keener appreciation for all three.
Sari Gruber, soprano; Joseph Gaines, tenor; Rob Frankenberry, tenor; Benjamin Binder, piano.
Lecture components researched, scripted, and performed by Benjamin Binder and Lucy Stewart (Education Curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art).
This project was funded by a grant from the Small Arts Initiative of the Heinz Foundation.
Visions of a Poet’s Love: Schumann’s Dichterliebe
Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, 28 November 2010.
It’s an old familiar story, but it stays forever new,
and when it is your story, it breaks your heart in two.
We present a beautiful and haunting emotional journey of yearning, bitterness, despair, and ultimately consolation in the rarely performed complete version (all 20 songs) of Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love), Robert Schumann’s timeless 19th-century masterpiece of song.
International baritone Troy Cook teams up with pianist and musicologist Benjamin Binder in this riveting concert event that also features photography created by Tom Persinger especially for this performance. The photography fuses 19th-century photographic techniques and aesthetics with a modern sensibility in an effort to reveal the enduring contemporary resonance of Schumann’s 200-year-old work. Poetry, music, and image come together in a unique multimedia experience that movingly brings Schumann’s world into our own.
Soprano Shannon Kessler-Dooley and baritone Daniel Teadt also perform a selection of Schumann’s songs that introduce us to the expressive imaginative universe of Dichterliebe, along with musicological reflections by Benjamin Binder.
Researched, programmed, and scripted by Benjamin Binder.