Performances + Events
Faculty Recital: Heidi Stober, Soprano and Tanya Blaich, Piano: "Despite and Still"
Jordan Hall
Inspired by Samuel Barber’s song cycle of that title, this program explores tenacity and resilience in navigating life’s challenges. Barber composed Despite and Still at the end of his life as he was grappling with creative inspiration, poor health, love loss and isolation. These songs resolve to reconcile and persevere.
WH Auden and Elisabeth Lutyens open the program, reflecting on the blessings of love despite limitations of time and personal shortcomings. Ethel Smyth and Ethel Carnie ponder the debilitating nature of possession in love and embrace freedom. Smyth exemplifies the essence of “despite and still” both in her perseverance as a woman composer in the early 20th century and her political activism as a suffragette. Ethel Smyth's Der Wald was the first opera by a woman composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
Maude Valérie White’s songs are inexplicably neglected today, yet she was considered one of the best song composers in the early 20th century in England. Despite discouragement from her family and Victorian societal norms, she studied at the Royal Academy of Music and wrote nearly 250 songs. Although the last performance of her songs at the Proms was in 1940, her compositions remain the most frequently performed by a woman composer in the history of that series.
Poems by Goethe, Schiller and Heine reflect on the emotional extremes of love in song settings by Franz Liszt. We encounter here the vitriol and deception, the intense pleasure and pain of love, and nevertheless are compelled to persist in pursuing this crowning grace of life.
Germaine Tailleferre wrote her 6 Chansons françaises after her first husband threatened to shoot her in the stomach when he heard she was pregnant with their first child. When she heard shots in the house, she ran away, miscarried because of the trauma and then divorced him. Two months later she had completed these cheeky songs about unconventional and abusive relationships.
The final set in the recital features songs by African American women composers and poets. Persevering in spite of racial and gender discrimination, these women articulate their desires to break out of those cages and take action.
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Artist(s)
Tanya Blaich is a pianist and teacher with particular sensitivity for and expertise in the song and collaborative piano repertoire. A faculty member of New England Conservatory's collaborative piano and voice departments since 2006, Blaich is co-coordinator of NEC’s Liederabend Series and teaches classes dedicated to the performance of song repertoire and in language diction and expression. Blaich has been praised for her “unfailingly expressive and finely judged” playing (The Guardian) and her “distinct and refined palette and textures” and “unwaveringly attentive” ensemble (Opera Today).
Blaich has performed in concert venues and festivals throughout the United States and Europe with such recitalists as Thomas Hampson, Paula Murrihy, Klemens Sander, and Sari Gruber. Recent highlights in the 2023-24 season include song recitals at the Frankfurt Opera with Paula Murrihy and at the Kurt Weill Festival with Ute Gfrerer. Upcoming concerts this year include song recitals at the Oxford International Song Festival with Heidi Stober and at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with Paula Murrihy. Blaich and Murrihy’s first album, I Will Walk With My Love: Folk-Inspired Songs and Myths, was released on Orchid Classics in 2020 to great acclaim.
As a guest artist, Blaich has given song recitals and master classes at universities and colleges throughout the U.S. In addition to her collaborations with singers, she has performed as a chamber music partner with members of the Colorado, Lydian, and Miro string quartets. She has also served as a coach and rehearsal pianist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society, and Odyssey Opera.
Tanya Blaich attended the University Paris-Sorbonne and graduated from Walla Walla College in Washington. She moved to Vienna to pursue her passion for the German Lied repertoire, earning a diploma in performance from the Vienna Conservatory in vocal accompaniment and chamber music. She subsequently earned both her M.M. and D.M.A. from New England Conservatory.
American soprano Heidi Stober, whom Opera News exclaimed is a “distinctly American lyric soprano that makes the rest of the world listen” is enjoying an international career with a crystalline voice and method-like commitment to stage acting.
In the 2024/25 season, Ms. Stober will make her debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden singing her acclaimed portrayal of Gretel in Hansel und Gretel, as well as appearances at the Deutsche Oper Berlin as Zdenka in Arabella, Pat Nixon in Nixon in China, the Semperoper Dresden as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte and the title role in Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots with English National Opera. In concert, Ms. Stober will debut with the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with Esa-Pekka Salonen, perform Mozart’s Requiem with the Musikkollegium Winterthur in Switzerland with Roberto González-Monjas, Pamina with Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. In solo recital, Ms. Stober will appear at the Oxford International Song Festival, the New England Conservatory in Jordan Hall, at Deutsche Oper Berlin, and with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago.
In the 2023/24 season, Heidi Stober returned to the Metropolitan Opera as Musetta in La bohème, conducted by Carlo Rizzi, premiered a new production of Nixon in China as Pat Nixon with Deutsche Oper Berlin, in addition to performances of Gretel, and sang the title role of Rahel in Detlev Glanert’s world premiere opera, Die Jüdin von Toledo at the Semperoper Dresden in a production by Robert Carsen. Also at Dresden, she sang performances of Pamina, and debuted with Opernhaus Zürich in Andreas Homoki’s production of Sweeney Todd as Johanna. In concert, Ms. Stober performed Mozart’s Requiem at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, conducted by music director Enrique Mazzola. In Boston, Ms. Stober performed in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Boston Baroque and sang Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass on tour in Spain with Omer Meir Wellber and the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.
Despite and Still
Inspired by Samuel Barber’s song cycle of that title, this program explores tenacity and resilience in navigating life’s challenges. Barber composed Despite and Still at the end of his life as he was grappling with creative inspiration, poor health, love loss and isolation. These songs resolve to reconcile and persevere.
WH Auden and Elisabeth Lutyens open the program, reflecting on the blessings of love despite limitations of time and personal shortcomings. Ethel Smyth and Ethel Carnie ponder the debilitating nature of possession in love and embrace freedom. Smyth exemplifies the essence of “despite and still” both in her perseverance as a woman composer in the early 20th century and her political activism as a suffragette. Ethel Smyth's Der Wald was the first opera by a woman composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
Maude Valérie White’s songs are inexplicably neglected today, yet she was considered one of the best song composers in the early 20th century in England. Despite discouragement from her family and Victorian societal norms, she studied at the Royal Academy of Music and wrote nearly 250 songs. Although the last performance of her songs at the Proms was in 1940, her compositions remain the most frequently performed by a woman composer in the history of that series.
Poems by Goethe, Schiller and Heine reflect on the emotional extremes of love in song settings by Franz Liszt. We encounter here the vitriol and deception, the intense pleasure and pain of love, and nevertheless are compelled to persist in pursuing this crowning grace of life.
Germaine Tailleferre wrote her 6 Chansons françaises after her first husband threatened to shoot her in the stomach when he heard she was pregnant with their first child. When she heard shots in the house, she ran away, miscarried because of the trauma and then divorced him. Two months later she had completed these cheeky songs about unconventional and abusive relationships.
The final set in the recital features songs by African American women composers and poets. Persevering in spite of racial and gender discrimination, these women articulate their desires to break out of those cages and take action.
