Performance

Brentano String Quartet and Dawn Upshaw

Dido Reimagined

October 01, 2022

This event occurred as part of the 22/23 Hop Presents season. This is an archived view.

A rethinking of Purcell's beloved opera that takes us into the inner psyche of the proud Queen of Carthage. Co-commissioned by the Hop.

22/23 Hop Presents

The Brentano String Quartet brings the doomed love story to life, starting the first half of the program with a contrasting, yet complimentary, mix of early English works for consort of viols and songs. The result is a luminous intimacy, beautifully private that the audience feels the privilege of eavesdropping on an undefended and vulnerable expression. And the culmination is Dido's famous lament, the intensely intimate plea confessed to a friend, as she relinquishes her hold on life.

The second half, co-commissioned by the Hop, sees Pulitzer-winning composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann breathe new life into Dido. They imagine her psyche, her vulnerability and her strength. Dawn Upshaw becomes Dido and explores Dido's raw honesty, allowing us to probe into the emotional richness inherent in her predicament.

Don't miss a pre-show talk with the artists at 6:15 pm in Top of the Hop.

Generously supported by the Marion and Frederick B. Whittemore '53, T'54 Distinguished Artist Series Fund, the Frank L. Harrington 1924 Fund No. 3, the Aires Family Fund for the Performing Arts and Linda and Frederick A. Roesch '60, T'61, P'88, P'90.

Program

The Project

Hopkins Center for the Art
presents

Brentano String Quartet
with Dawn Upshaw
Dido Reimagined

Mark Steinberg, violin
Serena Canin, violin
Misha Amory, viola
Nina Lee, cello

Dawn Upshaw, soprano

Saturday, October 1, 7:30 pm
Spaulding Auditorium • Dartmouth College • 2022

Generously supported by the Marion and Frederick B. Whittemore ’53, T’54 Distinguished Artist Series Fund, the Frank L. Harrington 1924 Fund No. 3, the Aires Family Fund for the Performing Arts and Linda and Frederick A. Roesch ’60, T’61, P’88, P’90.

Program

Approximate Duration: 90 minutes

Oh let me weep, from The Fairy Queen, Z629 (arr. Mark Steinberg), Henry Purcell
Fantasia a 4, in B-flat Major, Z736, Purcell

Suite No. 2 for four viols in D minor/Major: Fantazie, Matthew Locke
Come again, sweet love doth now invite (arr. Stephen Prutsman), John Dowland
Suite No. 2: Courante, Locke
Can she excuse my wrongs (arr. Prutsman), Dowland
Suite No. 2: Ayre, Locke
Weep you no more, sad fountains (arr. Prutsman), Dowland
Suite No. 2: Saraband, Locke

Alman, Thomas Tomkins
Though Amaryllis dance in green, William Byrd
The Witty Wanton, Robert Johnson

Fantasia a 4, in c minor, Z738, Purcell
When I am laid in earth (Dido’s Lament) from Dido and Aeneas, Z626, Purcell

Intermission

Dido Reimagined
a response to Purcell’s Lament
a monodrama for Dawn Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet
music by Melinda Wagner
libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann © 2019

Commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest, Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Rockport Music, Tisch Center for the Arts at 92nd St. Y, Wake Forest University - Secrest Artists Series, University of Maryland, Clarice Smith Center

The Brentano String Quartet appears by arrangement with David Rowe Artists www.davidroweartists.com, www.brentanoquartet.com
Dawn Upshaw appears by arrangement with Colbert Artists Management, Inc. www.colbertartists.com
Melinda Wagner is represented by Theodore Presser Company, www.presser.com
Stephanie Fleischmann is represented by The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc., barbarahogenson@gmail.com

Program Notes

Introduction to the Purcell, Dowland, Locke, Tomkins, Byrd and Johnson Selections

Imagine yourself before a painting by Vermeer. The light is soft, yet penetrating. The captured moment is inward, almost clandestine, yet here we are gazing into it, in relationship with it. The scene is simple, mundane even, yet replete with intricate detail, rewarding close attention. The intimacy of the experience, unassuming and direct, can also be piercingly emotional. We see the painting; simultaneously it seems to see into us.

This blending of interiority with revelation, this clarity of vision melding the rational and the instinctive, is a quality often evinced by the English music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We, as a string quartet, have in our ancestry the plaintive, pungent voices of the viol family, as well as the idea of the viol consort as an intimate gathering of friends conversing, cavorting and entangling strands of sense and sound. Our group has long been enriched by exploring this repertoire, enjoying the vibrant camaraderie and the frisson of lines that lean into each other as they both frolic and keen. The song repertoire of the period is, if anything, even more vulnerable, delicate and disarmingly pellucid. Gathering works here by composers Henry Purcell, John Dowland, Matthew Locke, Thomas Tomkins, William Byrd and Robert Johnson (who supplied music for Shakespeare’s productions) gives us a chance to shrink the concerthall into a parlor, to invite our audience to be our confidantes. The music combines elements of the public and the private; the listener can eavesdrop on the proceedings, can get drawn into the conversations and collisions, the friendliness and the frictions.

And with whom better to do this than Dawn Upshaw, a treasured collaborator of ours? Dawn has a way, when she sings, of making you feel she is speaking plainly, with utter candor, right to you, so beautifully suited to music both confessional and personal. The first half of our collaborative program weaves together instrumental and vocal music, starting and ending with Purcell arias on love and loss. The final aria, the perennially beloved Dido’s Lament, opens the door for the great new monodrama on the second half, Melinda Wagner and Stephanie Fleischmann’s Dido Reimagined, a reexamination of the archetypal figure of Dido, an operatic investigation drawn into the world of chamber music. It is with great gratitude for this new work and great excitement for the opportunity to discover it and bring it to life that we offer this program.

Mark Steinberg

Dido Reimagined

Dido, Queen of Carthage, was a remarkable woman. Unlike many heroines in the pantheon of Greek and Roman mythology, her beginnings were not rooted in aether. Nor was she merely a figment of the classical imagination. A historical figure who became myth, Dido has shifted shape and agendas through the ages. She has been transmogrified from lived personage to fictional character by Virgil in The Aeneid; by playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe in the play, Dido, Queen of Carthage; and by Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate in their opera, Dido and Aeneas, from which this evening’s Lament is excerpted; as well as by writers from Ovid to Dante, from Petrarch to Chaucer and beyond.

The real Dido, whose name evokes meanings encompassing “beloved” and “the wanderer,” was most likely a Phoenician queen of the city-state of Tyre, which is now Ṣūr, in Lebanon. After Dido’s brother murdered her husband, she fled to what is currently Tunisia, where the Berber king Iarbas offered her as much land as could be encircled by an ox hide. Dido cut the hide into strips, exponentially expanding the perimeter of her new kingdom, which would become Carthage, the prosperous city-state she founded. The “Dido Problem” in mathematics—the oldest problem in the Calculus of Variations—takes its name from Dido’s innovative thinking. King Iarbas’s offering did not come without strings attached. To avoid having to marry him, Dido built a funeral pyre and committed suicide, a practice not uncommon during the Greco- Roman era. In Dido’s clear-sighted hands, the gesture took the form of political protest.

When Melinda Wagner and I first spoke about writing a contemporary Dido for Dawn Upshaw and the Brentano String Quartet, we knew immediately that our Dido would not partake of the depiction of women imprinted on us by men through the centuries. We knew, too, that Dido’s epic love for Aeneas and her self-immolation in response to what she perceived as his abandonment of her—romantic tropes devised by Virgil and immortalized by Purcell and Tate (for Aeneas post-dated Dido by anywhere between 50 and 400 years)—needed to metamorphose in our hands. We were compelled by the notion of an epic love in contemporary times. What form might that take for a powerfully strong, complex woman of today, who has long realized her full potential in terms of both career and family? A woman whose experience of first love is but a distant memory. How does she allow herself to get so knocked off kilter, so swept off her feet? What is the fallout of that? In both Virgil and Purcell/Tate’s versions, Dido’s lovesickness is incited and meddled with by Venus and Juno. But in an era without any gods, where does that intensity of feeling come from? It seemed to us that there was no better medium than music with which to explore this question.

Dido of ancient times, whether real or fictional, had no choice. Our Dido, however, has the power to determine her own fate. I have been lucky enough to keep returning, over the years, to a writing retreat on an island where there are no cars, no shops, only a few houses and a landscape strewn with ancient rocks, covered with windblown trees, and ringed by sea. Our Dido’s refuge was inspired by my time in this place. Our Dido does not choose death. She removes herself from the everyday world, she chooses solitude. She returns to nature, she becomes one with it.

Together, Melinda and I have attempted to make something between a song cycle and a monodrama. A piece of music drama that is simultaneously journey and meditation. A reflection on the power of love, on the passage of time, on loss, resilience and the restorative power of a disappearing world.

Stephanie Fleischmann, Hudson, NY, December 2021

About the Artists

Since its inception in 1992, the Brentano String Quartet has appeared throughout the world to popular and critical acclaim. “Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding,” raves the London Independent; the New York Times extols its “luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.”

Within a few years of its formation, the Quartet garnered the first Cleveland Quartet Award and the Naumburg Chamber Music Award and was also honored in the United Kingdom with the Royal Philharmonic Award for Most Outstanding Debut. Since then, the Quartet has concertized widely, performing in the world’s most prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Suntory Hall in Tokyo and the Sydney Opera House.

In addition to performing the entire two-century range of the standard quartet repertoire, the Brentano Quartet maintains a strong interest in contemporary music and has commissioned many new works. Their latest project, a monodrama for quartet and voice called Dido Reimagined, was composed by Pulitzer-winning composer Melinda Wagner and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, and will premiere in January 2022 with soprano Dawn Upshaw. Other recent commissions include the composers Matthew Aucoin, Lei Liang, Vijay Iyer, James Macmillan and a cello quintet by Steven Mackey (with Wilhelmina Smith, cello).

The Brentano Quartet has worked closely with other important composers of our time, among them Elliot Carter, Charles Wuorinen, Chou Wen-chung, Bruce Adolphe and György Kurtág. They have also been privileged to collaborate with such artists as soprano Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and pianists Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss, and Mitsuko Uchida. The Quartet has recorded works by Mozart and Schubert for Azica Records, and all of Beethoven’s late Quartets for the Aeon label. In 2012, they provided the central music (Beethoven Opus 131) for the critically-acclaimed independent film A Late Quartet.

Since 2014, the Brentano Quartet has served as Artists-in-Residence at the Yale School of Music. They were formerly the Ensemble-in-Residence at Princeton University, and were twice invited to be the collaborative ensemble for the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

The Quartet is named for Antonie Brentano, whom many scholars consider to be Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” the intended recipient of his famous love confession.

Joining a rare natural warmth with a fierce commitment to the transforming communicative power of music, Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to the freshest sounds of today. Her ability to reach to the heart of music and text has earned her both the devotion of an exceptionally diverse audience and the awards and distinctions accorded to only the most distinguished of artists. In 2007, she was named a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, the first vocal artist to be awarded the five-year “genius” prize, and in 2008 she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Her acclaimed performances on the opera stage comprise the great Mozart roles (Susanna, Ilia, Pamina, Despina and Zerlina) as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc and Messiaen. From Salzburg, Paris and Glyndebourne to the Metropolitan Opera, where she began her career in 1984 and has since made nearly 300 appearances, Dawn Upshaw has also championed numerous new works created for her including The Great Gatsby by John Harbison; the Grawemeyer Award-winning opera L’Amour de Loin and oratorio La Passion de Simone by Kaija Saariaho; John Adams’s Nativity oratorio El Niño; and Osvaldo Golijov’s chamber opera Ainadamar and song cycle Ayre.

It says much about Dawn Upshaw’s sensibilities as an artist and colleague that she is a favored partner of many leading musicians, including Gilbert Kalish, the Kronos Quartet, James Levine and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In her work as a recitalist, and particularly in her work with composers, Dawn Upshaw has become a generative force in concert music, having premiered more than 25 works in the past decade. From Carnegie Hall to large and small venues throughout the world she regularly presents specially designed programs composed of lieder, contemporary works in many languages, and folk and popular music. She furthers this work in master classes and workshops with young singers at major music festivals, conservatories and liberal arts colleges. She is the Head of the Vocal Arts Program at the Tanglewood Music Center and was the founding Artistic Director of the Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

A five-time Grammy Award winner, Dawn Upshaw is featured on more than 50 recordings, including the million-selling Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Gorecki for Nonesuch Records. Her discography also includes full-length opera recordings of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro; Messiaen’s St. Francois d’Assise; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; John Adams’s El Niño; two volumes of Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” a dozen recital recordings and an acclaimed three-disc series of Osvaldo Golijov’s music for Deutsche Grammophon. She received the 2014 Best Classical Vocal Solo Grammy for Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks on the ArtistShare Label.

Dawn Upshaw holds honorary doctorate degrees from Yale, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Allegheny College and Illinois Wesleyan University. She began her career as a 1984 winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions and the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Competition, and was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Development Program.

Ms. Upshaw has recorded extensively for the Nonesuch label. She may also be heard on Angel/EMI, BMG, Deutsche Grammophon, London, Sony Classical, Telarc, and on Erato and Teldec in the Warner Classics Family of labels.

Celebrated as an “...eloquent, poetic voice in contemporary music...” [American Record Guide], Melinda Wagner’s esteemed catalog of works embodies music of exceptional beauty, power and intelligence. Wagner received widespread attention when her colorful Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Since then, major works have included Concerto for Trombone, for Joseph Alessi and the New York Philharmonic, a piano concerto, Extremity of Sky, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony for Emanuel Ax, and Little Moonhead, composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, as part of its popular “New Brandenburgs” project.

Noted for its “...prismatic colors and...lithe sense of mystery...” (Washington Post), Extremity of Sky has been performed by Emanuel Ax with the National Symphony (on tour), the Toronto and Kansas City Symphonies, and the Staatskapelle Berlin.

Among honors Wagner has received is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP. Wagner was given an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College and a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Melinda Wagner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017.

A passionate and inspiring teacher, Melinda Wagner has given master classes at many fine institutions across the United States, including Harvard, Yale, Eastman, Juilliard and UC Davis. She has held faculty positions at Brandeis University and Smith College, and has served as a mentor at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Wellesley Composers Conference and Yellow Barn. Ms. Wagner currently serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music.

Stephanie Fleischmann is a librettist and playwright whose texts serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. Her “lyrical monologues” (New York Times), “smart” opera libretti (Opera News), plays and music-theater works have been performed internationally and across the United States.

Libretti (upcoming): In a Grove (Christopher Cerrone; Pittsburgh & LA Opera); Another City (Jeremy Howard Beck; Houston Grand Opera); The Pigeon Keeper (David Hanlon; Santa Fe Opera); Arkhipov (Peter Knell; Seattle Opera/Jacaranda). Operas premiered: Poppaea (Michael Hersch; Wien Moderne, Vienna, & ZeitRäume Basel); The Long Walk (Opera Saratoga, Utah Opera, Pittsburgh Opera); After the Storm (HGOco); The Property (Chicago Lyric Unlimited). Current collaborations: Matthew Recio (COT; West Edge’s Aperture), Justine F. Chen, Christina Campanella; Julia Adolphe. Texts for voice: Anna Clyne (Scottish National Chamber Orchestra), Chris Cerrone (Yale/Northeastern), Gity Razaz (Brooklyn Youth Chorus), Olga Neuwirth (Aldeburgh, Basel, Berlin).

Selected plays/music-theater works: Dio (Daniel Kluger); Sound House (the Flea/New Georges; The Visitation, a sound walk (HERE) and Red Fly/Blue Bottle (HERE; EMPAC, Noorderzon, NL), both with Christina Campanella and Mallory Catlett; Niagara (Bobby Previte/Daniel Fish; Hudson Opera House); The Secret Lives of Coats (Red Eye, Minneapolis); The Sweetest Life (New Victory LabWorks); Eloise & Ray (New Georges); Orpheus (HERE). Performed/developed via: Roundhouse Studio (London), Exit Festival (France), MASS MoCA, Birmingham Rep (UK), Synchronicity, Roadworks, Son of Semele, Soho Rep, Mabou Mines/SUITE, Public Theater.

“luxuriously warm sound [and] yearning lyricism.”
The New York Times on the Brentano String Quartet

“Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding”
The London Independent on the Brentano String Quartet

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