C L A S S I C A L S E R I E S

T H A N K YO U TO O U R S P O N S O R S

NASHVILLE SYMPHONY

GIANCARLO GUERRERO, conductor

NASHVILLE SYMPHONY CHORUS

KELLY CORCORAN, chorus director

BLAIR CHILDREN’S CHORUS

MARY BIDDLECOMBE, children’s chorus artistic director

JESSICA RIVERA, soprano

SASHA COOKE, mezzo-soprano

GARRETT SORENSON, tenor

RUSSELL BRAUN, baritone

A grant from the Flora Family Foundation will support the Nashville Symphony’s efforts to preserve, promote and expand American orchestral music during the 2015/16 season.

JOHN ADAMSOn the Transmigration of Souls

INTERMISSION

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, “Choral”

Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestosoMolto vivaceAdagio molto e cantabilePresto - Allegro assai - Allegro assai vivace

Jessica Rivera, sopranoSasha Cooke, mezzo sopranoGarrett Sorenson, tenorRussell Braun, baritone

A E G I S

EST. 2013

FOUNDATIONS C I E N C E S

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BEETHOVEN’S NINTH

SEPTEMBER 11 & 12, AT 8 PM AT 3 PM AT 7 PMTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, FRIDAY & SATURDAY, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13,

& JOHN ADAMS’ HOMAGE TO 9/11

These concerts are dedicated to the memory of Candice Zimmermann.

Mary C. Ragland Foundation

WEEKEND CONCERT SPONSORS

MEDIA PARTNER

OFFICIAL PARTNER

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TONIGHT’S CONCERTAT A GLANCE

JOHN ADAMS On the Transmigration of Souls

• America’s most-performed living composer, John Adams wrote On the Transmigration of Souls as a tribute to the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The work was premiered by the New York Philharmonic on September 19, 2002, to mark the one-year anniversary of the tragedy. The following year, the composer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

• Some of the pre-recorded spoken text in Transmigration is taken from the missing-persons posters and signs that were posted around the World Trade Center site following the attacks. Adams also incorporated excerpts from The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” series, which profiled some of the lives lost in the attacks, along with sound clips that he recorded on the streets of New York late at night.

• Adams calls On the Transmigration of Souls a “memory space…a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions.” Though the piece was written in response to 9/11, the composer has expressed his hope that the work will “summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event.”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9

• One of the most beloved works in the history of music, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the composer’s final masterpiece. He conducted the premiere on May 7, 1824, in Vienna. Completely deaf by this point, the composer wasn’t able to hear the music and thus didn’t realize when the performance had actually ended. One of the singers had to get him to turn around to face the audience, who were applauding wildly.

• Beethoven adapted the text for the Ninth’s famous “Ode to Joy” chorus from a popular poem by German writer Friedrich Schiller. Written in the 1780s, the poem was given many other musical treatments before Beethoven’s, but his is the one that has endured through the centuries. Today, Beethoven’s adaption of the song is the official anthem of the European Union.

• Though the exuberant fourth movement contains the Ninth’s most memorable music, the entire work explores a full range of emotion and human experience. With its dramatic opening and tragic-sounding first movement, the Ninth undertakes a monumental journey from darkness to light that has come to define the essence of Beethoven’s artistic expression. The work set a new standard for what symphonic music could be and would go on to influence the music of Brahms, Mahler and arguably every composer since.

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JOHN ADAMS

Composed: 2002First performance: September 19, 2002, in New York City, with Lorin Maazel conducting the New York Philharmonic; sound design by Mark GreyFirst Nashville Symphony performance: These are the orchestra’s first performances.Estimated length: 25 minutes

On the Transmigration of Souls

Born on February 15, 1947, in Worcester, MA; currently lives in Berkeley, CA

Can art really heal in times of tragedy? In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this

question acquired a sudden new urgency, and the responses ranged dramatically — from despair over whether art might simply be useless, to an affirmation of its power to help us come to terms with the unimaginable. When the New York Philharmonic requested him to write a work commemorating the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, John Adams himself initially resisted: “It seemed like a fool’s errand, trying to make musical or poetic expression of an event that continued to ache like a raw nerve in the national psyche,” the composer recalls in his memoir, Hallelujah Junction.

By this point in his career, Adams was already recognized as a contemporary master — the spearhead of an American renaissance not only in the concert hall, but also in the opera house. Yet on occasion Adams had also become a lightning rod for controversy, as with his second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, which was based on an act of terrorism that took place in 1985. Add to this the fact that the stakes were especially high for this new commission. The piece was scheduled to be unveiled in the Philharmonic’s first concert of the season — a little over a year after that abysmal day in 2001.

Yet Adams decided it would be irresponsible to reject the challenge. He writes: “I agreed to do it in large part because I felt that a serious artist ought to be able to rise to the occasion and fulfill a need

for a public statement that went beyond the usual self-centered, auteur concerns of his own personal individualism.”

A frantically tight deadline seems only to have spurred Adams to find an unprecedented solution for composing On the Transmigration of Souls. Immersing himself in the huge mass of material documenting reactions from survivors and those who had lost loved ones, Adams assembled a text of tragic, found poetry made of phrases from the missing-persons posters and signs scattered for months near the ruins of the World Trade Center site. Other sources were the “Portraits of Grief ” series published in The New York Times and — to particularly haunting effect — the words of one of the flight attendants recorded just before the first collision: “I see water and buildings….”

The “floating blizzard of paper” that suddenly appeared in the sky after the North Tower was struck also profoundly influenced Adams’s concept for Transmigration: “That image of those millions of particles eerily, silently floating from an immense height was the generating idea of the piece.”

“I decided that the only way to approach this theme was to make it about the most intimate experiences of the people involved,” Adams explains. Rather than a requiem or memorial, or even a “response,” he has described the resulting work as a “memory space…a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions.” While the link to 9/11 “is there if you want to contemplate it,” Adams hopes that the work “will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event.”

In 2003 the composer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for On the Transmigration of Souls.

Transmigration is a densely layered composition that unfolds in a single span lasting close to

a half-hour. Along with its enormous orchestra, full chorus and children’s chorus (perhaps evoking associations with Benjamin Britten’s similarly genre-defying War Requiem), it incorporates at the beginning and end a sonic portrait of New York City’s streets late at night, recorded by Adams in the spring of 2002. The composer’s pre-recorded

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

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soundtrack also includes a recitation of names, for which he enlisted his wife, the photographer Deborah O’Grady, and their two children to take part. (You can hear Adams’s own voice on this recording as well.)

According to scholar David Schiff, Transmigration marks nothing less than “a turning point in Adams’s work,” and its complex overlaying “takes Adams’s high-tech sound into a spiritual realm.” This blend of live and recorded sound is a signature of the piece — and poses unique acoustical challenges that need to be addressed differently in each performance space.

As a musical and spiritual throughline, Adams turned to the mystically tinged Charles Ives tone poem The Unanswered Question, in which an enigmatic trumpet phrase poses “the perennial question of existence,” in Ives’s words. Both the trumpet motif and the shimmer of ethereal string harmonies in the Ives appear enigmatically in Transmigration as material that “hides within my scrim of sonic imagery,” as Adams puts it. (Ives also wrote a little-known tone poem, The General Slocum, inspired by a steamboat disaster in 1891 that had claimed the highest number of civilian

casualties in New York prior to 9/11.)The wordless chorus is profoundly affecting

when it first enters. The music builds to a violent instrumental climax dominated by horns and brass. This recedes, and the ensuing choral sections juxtapose the matter-of-fact simplicity of the words with an unbearable depth of grieving and loss. All of the vocal and instrumental forces join together for an even more powerful climax, the voices ecstatically repeating the words “Love” and “Light.”

Schiff points out that the density of material in Transmigration is not a random “sound collage.” Rather, Adams arranges this disparate material

ALL OF THE VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL FORCES JOIN TOGETHER FOR AN EVEN MORE POWERFUL CLIMAX, THE VOICES ESTATICALLY REPEATING THE WORDS “LOVE” AND “LIGHT.”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Composed: 1822-24 (but drawing on sketches dating back to 1817, when the work was originally commissioned)First performance: May 7, 1824, in Vienna First Nashville Symphony performance: April 18, 1950, at War Memorial Auditorium with Music Director William Strickland Estimated length: 65-70 minutes

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125

Born on December 16, 1770, in Bonn (then in the Electorate of Cologne); died on March 26, 1827, in Vienna

“In our canon of more than a century’s work of American orchestral music, there apparently

was not a single work that had the power or pride of position to answer the needs of that peculiar moment in history,” Adams writes, reflecting on the problem orchestras faced in their search for appropriate programming right after 9/11. There were shorter, elegiac pieces like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, yet it seemed that “we could not contribute anything on the level of a grand public statement of communally shared hope and idealism such as Beethoven or Mahler would satisfy.”

“in a careful, therapeutic course from the secular to the sacred, leading to a vision of redemption when the sonic chaos converges to form a vast carillon.”

On the Transmigration of Souls is scored for piccolo and 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, 4 percussionists, 2 harps, piano, celesta, quarter-tone piano or keyboard sampler, strings, pre-recorded multi-channel soundtrack, SATB chorus and children’s chorus.

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ALTHE FIRST AUDIENCE TO HEAR THE NINTH

— AT A SPRING CONCERT IN VIENNA ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN 1824, THREE YEARS BEFORE BEETHOVEN’S DEATH — MUST HAVE REALIZED THEY WERE EXPERIENCING SOMETHING UNPRECEDENTED.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

It was the last of Beethoven’s symphonies that was called into service to fill that gap after 9/11 — as it has following so many world historical crises. The world premiere of On the Transmigration of Souls in 2002 also paired that work with the Ninth.

What is it about this musical monument that has such resonance? Adams poses the question: “Were the kind of Enlightenment ideals of Beethoven…simply relics of the past, no longer possible in our more ironic and painfully self-conscious contemporary climate…or was Beethoven simply a greater artist who spoke in a language of the sublime that no American composer could hope to rise to?”

The first audience to hear the Ninth — at a spring concert in Vienna on a Friday night in 1824, three years before Beethoven’s death — must have realized they were experiencing something unprecedented. But it’s unlikely they could have foreseen the massive impact this music would have on the course of music history. There had only been time for two full rehearsals. The actual performance of such difficult music — with its strange rhythmic ideas in the Scherzo and the nearly impossible vocal demands in the finale — would have sounded downright awful to our spoiled ears.

In fact, Vienna didn’t even have a symphony orchestra proper. The model of a permanent, self-standing orchestra devoted to concert music had appeared sporadically in cities like Paris and London, but it did not become standard until after Beethoven’s death — in no small part stimulated by the challenges his symphonies posed (above all, the Ninth). A curious footnote: the initial spur to compose the Ninth was triggered by a commission from one of those rare metropolitan orchestras of the time, the Philharmonic Society of London,

which commissioned a new symphony from Beethoven in 1817.

The Ninth seems to encompass extremes of experience. Many tend to think of this music with its finale front and center, reducing it to an “ode to joy,” yet the vast first movement stands as an unsurpassed expression of heroic tragedy, venturing even beyond the dark intensity of Beethoven’s Fifth. What, then, to make of the Scherzo with its primal energy (and, in its contrasting sections, a still different kind of “joy”)? And where does the transcendent beauty of the Adagio fit into the spectrum between tragedy and joy? Well before Mahler trumpeted the symphony as a form that “must be like the world” and “embrace everything,” Beethoven was creating a whole cosmos from the genre he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart — with the help of Friedrich Schiller’s idealistic poetry.

Emerging out of an indistinct void of pulsing chords, the Ninth seems to start with an

atmospheric “slow” prelude. But this is already the “real time” of the first movement: Beethoven presents fragments that drift downward into the abyss until, with a mighty increase in volume and power, he hammers them together into his titanic main theme, itself centered around the simple pattern of a descending D minor chord.

Here is one secret of the Ninth (and of Beethoven overall): this composer’s genius for constructing vast, intricate architectures out of such elementary material. Even the lyrical grace of the contrasting, stepwise theme that follows (it contains a hint of the “joy” theme to come) gets swept away in the surge of the first movement’s restless development. With the return of the opening music, Beethoven sounds an apocalyptic tone with sustained, fierce thunder from the timpani. As a further surprise, he caps the movement with a lengthy final section. It ratchets up the tension one last time by coupling repetition with an unrelenting, gradual crescendo.

The rhythmic insistence of the first movement subliminally prepares the way for the Scherzo — unusually positioned as the second movement, rather than the third. The energy here has a densely concentrated quality: the elementary motifs follow

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repetitive patterns so insistent that they look more than a century ahead to Minimalism.

For all their contrasts — epic sprawl versus an eternally circling primal dance — the first two movements share a sense of colossal forces at play. With the Adagio Beethoven enters an entirely new realm of beatific contemplation. Structurally, this third movement is rather straightforward: a set of variations based on two very different alternating themes. Each inhabits its own key and has its own pacing: the first in the prevailing very slow tempo and the second with a more flowing motion. The latter theme’s key also moves into D major, which looks ahead to the key of the final movement.

By introducing the human voice, the Ninth’s finale crossed an aesthetic Rubicon that claimed new territory for the symphony. Just as remarkable is the way Beethoven stages the emergence of that voice from the drama of the purely instrumental music we hear in the opening minutes of the final movement. It begins with a terrifying chord of dissonance, evoking the chaos out of which the Ninth had come into being in the very first movement. Here, though, the chaos is violent and anguished rather than mysteriously amorphous. Beethoven then has the orchestra reminisce over the ideas that have been presented up to this point in the work. But the wordless insistence of the low strings rejects each of these reminiscences as insufficient. How then to move forward, to find the promised land?

The chord of terror reappears, as if all that has been achieved is worthless. But now the solo baritone breaks into the soundscape with a cry to try something different. The instruments begin

the way, developing the “joy theme” via successive layering and then allowing the individual voices of the solo quartet to join in. For his text, Beethoven adapted selections from Schiller’s lengthy “Ode to Joy” of 1785.

From this point on, the final movement unfolds as a loose series of variations on the new theme. Here, too, Beethoven’s cosmic idea of what a symphony can express is worked out. At one extreme, the variations encompass the humor of the gruff contrabassoon that “recharges” the music after it has come to a sudden halt. What follows is an eccentric variation featuring the tenor solo (in very high range) against clanging cymbals and other gestures that, to European ears of the time, evoked a Turkish military band. Another extreme is heard in the elevated tone of music associated with a transcendent Being “beyond the starry firmament,” to quote Schiller’s text. Here Beethoven elicits feelings of sacred awe.

Pioneering as the Ninth Symphony is, this music also pays homage to the riches of the past: in particular, to the choral music of Handel’s magnificent oratorios, which Beethoven admired deeply. Rather than merely present his ideas as a string of contrasting variations, Beethoven also relies on the Baroque technique of counterpoint, fusing disparate ideas into a larger, unified complex.

Music this powerful carries with it attendant dangers for abuse. “Some enshrine it, others attempt to tear it down,” David Benjamin Levy writes in his detailed study of the Ninth Symphony. But Beethoven’s monumental achievement endures. As Levy puts it: “[T]he mountain remains, and, as is the case with revelation itself, the essential truth of the Ninth Symphony can be neither proven nor disproven. Coming to terms with the work involves a kind of leap of faith.”

In addition to solo vocal quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) and four-part chorus (in the fourth movement only), the Ninth Symphony is scored for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, and strings.

— Thomas May, the Nashville Symphony’s program annotator, is a writer and translator who covers classical and contemporary music. He blogs at memeteria.com.

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TEXT & TRANSLATION FOR “ODE TO JOY”

AN DIE FREUDEO Freunde, nicht diese Töne!sondern lasst uns angenemere anstimmen,und freudenvollere. — Beethoven

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,Tochter aus Elysium,Wir betreten feuertrunken,Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.Deine Zauber binden wiederWas die Mode streng geteilt,Alle Menschen werden Brüder,Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,Mische seinen Jubel ein!Ja, wer auch nur eine SeeleSein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehleWeinend sich aus diesem Bund.

Freude trinken alle WesenAn den Brüsten der Natur,Alle Guten, alle BösenFolgen ihrer Rosenspur.Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod,Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,Und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegenDurch des Himmels prächt’gen Plan,Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!Brüder, überm SternenzeltMuss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen!Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?Such ihn überm Sternenzelt!Über Sternen muss er wohnen. — Friedrich Schiller

ODE TO JOYO friends, not these sounds!Rather let us begin to sing more pleasantlyand more joyously.

Joy, fair spark of the gods,daughter of Elysium,We enter, intoxicated with fire,Heavenly One, your holy place.Your magic again uniteswhat custom strictly divided;all men become brotherswhere your gentle wings abide.

Whoever has had the great fortuneof being friend to a friend,whoever has won a loving woman,let him add his jubilation!Yes, even he who calls but one soulon earth his own!And he who has never done it, let himsteal away, weeping, from this company.

All creatures drink joyat Nature’s breast,all good, all evil onesfollow her trail of roses.She gave us kisses and vines,a friend, proven faithful to death;Pleasure was given even to the worm,and the cherub stands before God.

Happy, as his suns flythrough heaven’s magnificent design,follow, brothers, your path,joyfully, like a hero to victory.

Be embraced, ye millions!This kiss to the whole world!Brothers, beyond the starry skysurely a loving Father dwells.

Do you fall prostrate, ye millions?Do you sense the Creator, World?Seek Him beyond the starry sky!Beyond the stars He must dwell.

Phrases of the above text are alternated and combined, especially in the latter part of the movement.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

JESSICA RIVERA, soprano

Possessing a voice praised by the San

Francisco Chronicle for its “effortless precision and tonal luster,” soprano Jessica Rivera is one of the most

creatively inspired vocal artists before the public today. The intelligence, dimension and spirituality with which she infuses her performances has garnered Rivera unique collaborations with many of today’s most celebrated composers, including John Adams, Gabriela Lena Frank, Osvaldo Golijov, Jonathan Leshnoff and Nico Muhly.

Rivera’s 2014/15 season featured performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Peter Oundjian and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem with Robert Spano and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares with Nicholas Carter and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, a concert celebration of “Día de los Muertos” with Donato Cabrera and the San Francisco Symphony and Theofanidis’ Creation Oratorio with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Chamber music engagements in her recent season included performances with the St. Lawrence String Quartet at Stanford University and Chamber Music Monterey Bay. Rivera also continued her Artist Residency Program with San Francisco Performances and released two records — an exclusive iTunes release of Robert Spano’s Hölderlin-Lieder and Classical Spanish Songs with pianist L. Mark Carver on the Urtext label.

Rivera was heralded in the world premiere of John Adams’s opera A Flowering Tree, singing the role of Kumudha, in a production directed by Peter Sellars as part of the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. Since then, she has performed A Flowering Tree for her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker with Sir Simon Rattle and, under the composer’s baton, with the Cincinnati Opera, San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Lincoln Center and the London Symphony Orchestra.

SASHA COOKE, mezzo-soprano

GRAMMY®-winning mezzo-

soprano Sasha Cooke has been called a “luminous standout” (New York Times) and “equal parts poise,

radiance and elegant directness” (Opera News). Recognized notably in the French and German repertoire, Cooke appears frequently singing Mahler and Berlioz, composers whose works she has sung on four different continents. Sought after for her versatile repertoire and commitment to new music, she continues to give world premiere performances and take part in unique artistic collaborations.

Symphonic engagements of Cooke’s 2014/15 season included performances of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette with Tugan Sokhiev and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Verdi’s Requiem with Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Houston Symphony, Mahler’s Third Symphony with Sir Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony, Handel’s Messiah with Matthew Halls and the Philadelphia Orchestra and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. Her recent operatic engagements have included the world premieres of Laura Kaminsky’s As One at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, commissioned for her and baritone Kelly Markgraf by American Opera Projects.

Operatic highlights of Cooke’s career include her San Francisco Opera debut as the title role in the world premiere of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, in which she was hailed as “the glory of the production” (San Francisco Examiner). She is a renowned interpreter of Mahler’s symphonic works, frequently collaborating with the world’s leading conductors and orchestras. A dedicated recitalist, Cooke was presented by Young Concert Artists in her New York and Washington debuts at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Kennedy Center.

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GARRETT SORENSON, tenor

A merican tenor Garrett Sorenson

has been praised as an artist of unique interest, garnering critical acclaim for the beauty and power

of his rich lyric voice. He recently completed an extended run of Terrance McNally’s Master Class on Broadway opposite Tyne Daly, which was successfully transferred to London’s West End. The production received a 2012 Tony nomination for Best Revival of a Play.

Highlights of Sorenson’s recent seasons include his return to West Australian Opera as Rodolfo in La Bohème, his role debut as Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca at Arizona Opera, and a new production of Bedřich Smetana’s The Kiss with Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He also returned to the Metropolitan Opera to cover the roles of the Prince in Rusalka, Lensky in Eugene Onegin, and Matteo in Arabella. Concert appearances included Mozart’s Requiem with The Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of David Robertson, Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass at the Grant Park Music Festival under the baton of Carlos Kalmar, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with Giancarlo Guerrero conducting The Cleveland Orchestra at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.

A graduate of the Lindemann Young Artists Development Program, Sorenson made his company debut at the Metropolitan Opera with Bellini’s Il Pirata as Itulbo, opposite Renée Fleming. A consummate concert performer and recitalist, he participated in “The Song Continues” under the auspices of the Marilyn Horne Foundation, a weeklong series of performances and master classes at Carnegie Hall. Among his honors and awards, Sorenson was the winner of the Opera Birmingham Young Singer Contest and the Sorantin Young Artist Award. He was also named a winner at the 2003 George London Foundation Competition and a Sara Tucker Study Grant Winner. In 2004, he was awarded the Richard Tucker Foundation Career Grant.

RUSSELL BRAUN, baritone

Renowned for his luminous

voice “capable of the most powerful explosions as well as the gentlest covered notes” (Toronto Star),

baritone Russell Braun rightfully claims his place on the concert, opera and recital stages of the world. His intelligent portrayals of Chou En-lai, Billy Budd, Prince Andrei, Figaro, Papageno, Count Almaviva, Don Giovanni, Pelléas, Eugene Onegin and The Traveller have captivated audiences at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, l’Opéra de Paris, the State Opera in Vienna, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, the Los Angeles Opera and La Scala in Milan.

The 2015/16 season offers Braun a challenging combination of concerts and operas in works from Brahms, Mozart and Vaughn Williams to Hans Werner Henze and Peter Eötvös. The season opens in Amsterdam, with performances of Brahms’s Vier Ernste Gesänge and Fauré’s Requiem with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, followed by Vaughn Williams’s A Sea Symphony with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He makes his debut with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids.

The 2014/15 season featured Braun’s debut as Ford in the Canadian Opera Company production of Falstaff, Lescaut in the Metropolitan Opera production of Manon, and in a special evening called “The Music of McEwan” with author Ian McEwan and pianist Angela Hewitt at the 92nd St. Y in New York. Recent seasons have included debuts as Chou En-lai in John Adams’s Nixon in China and as Olivier alongside Renée Fleming in Capriccio, both at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Braun’s discography includes the GRAMMY®-nominated Das Lied von der Erde (Dorian) and JUNO winners Mozart Arie e duetti (CBC) and Apollo e Daphne. His most recent release is Dietch’s Le Vaisseau Fantôme with Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble on the Naïve label.

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MARY BIDDLECOMBE, artistic director

Asa AbbotDevon AndersonKamryn V. BoydBrooks Bradbury-FawnsMary ByrdSophie CamardoCarmen A. CanedoMary Catherine ClaverieBecca CulleyKatherine DeeganCaitlin Dobbins

Abbey FitzgeraldMelissa GramlingWill GrowdonGrey HigginbothamSophia HowardAnna HunleyGraham A. JacksonSavannah JonesEmily KrasinskiLorelei McDanielRaphael McKerley-Geier

Swasti MishraAshley MorrellMack L. PageRebecca Page-McCawHannah J. ParkDonald Pierce IIIEmma ReynoldsSophia SaavedraJessica SchreiberGarrett ScottMadison Shaw

Cecily Z. ShiJaden Smith-BorneJennie Mae SprouseKristen StetzerBen T. StrobelMargot SuchetCameron ThompsonRose ThompsonClara WarfordHaviland WhitingVictoria Zamora

BLAIR CHILDREN’S CHORUS

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NASHVILLE SYMPHONY CHORUS

SOPRANOBeverly AndersonKaren ArgentAmie BatesElizabeth BeldenLaura Bigbee-FottJill BoehmeStephanie BreiwaSue ChoiAngela Pasquini CliffordSara CurtissAmanda Leigh DierSarah DonovanAshlinn DowlingKatie DoyleCarissa EldridgeDenise FullerKelli GauthierJane HarrisonVanessa Jackson*Melissa JonesStephanie KopelBarbara LaiferKatie LawrencePenny LueckenhoffElizabeth Madsen Marisa McWilliamsAlisha MenardJean MillerJessica MooreCarolyn Naumann*Diana NeelyGail Oturu Hannah PlummerElizabeth RingTyler SamuelMaureen Schlacter Debbie SchraugerRenita Crittendon Smith

Anna SpenceSarah StallingsJennifer StevensSarah StultzClair SusongMarva SwannMarla ThompsonJennice ThrelkeldSarah Upchurch Jan VolkKathryn Whitaker

ALTOCarol ArmesElaine BraunMary Callahan*Cathi CarmackLauren ChristiansTeresa CissellLisa CooperJaci CordellPaula CorbachoKaitlin CroffordJessica DavidCarla DavisLeriel DavisSadie DunnEmily GaskillElizabeth GilliamJudith GriffinLeah Handelsman*Leah KoestenShelly McCormackSarah MillerAnnemarie NeffNicole PasquarelloAnita PeeblesDebbie ReylandStephanie Robinson Kraft

Ursula RodenLaura SikesJessica TaylorChristina Van RegenmorterKelby WengerSarah WilsonMiranda Wright

TENOREric BoehmeBrandon ByrdChriston CarneyBrett CartwrightJames CortnerDavid DuBoseJoe FitzpatrickDanny GordonCory HowellLynn McGillTyler McKenzieMark NaumannRyan NorrisBill PaulJohn Perry*Keith RamseyDavid Satterfield*Daniel Sissom Eddie SmithStephen SparksJoel TellinghuisenChristopher ThompsonBen TrotterElvie WilliamsJames W. WhiteScott WolfeJonathan Yeaworth

BASSGary AdamsGilbert AldridgeRobert AndersonRobert BegtrupKenton DickersonPatrick DunnevantThomas EdenScott EdwardsMark FilosaJohn FordStuart GarberRichard HatfieldMichael HopfeCarl JohnsonClinton JohnsonNeal KoleskeTodd LawrenceBill Loyd*Bob MacKendreeRobert MahurinTommy McCormacMatthew McNeillW. Bruce MeriwetherAndrew Miller*Christopher MixonJuan MunozDwayne MurraySteve Myers Steve PrichardJ. Fred RowlesScott SandersJesse SarloLarry StrachanDavid ThomasBrian Warford

* Section leaders

KELLY CORCORAN, chorus director

John Manson, President

Cory Howell, Assistant Director

Sara Crigger, Librarian

Jeff Burnham, Accompanist