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Susan Davenny Wyner (born Susan Davenny, October 17, 1943) is a nationally-acclaimed American conductor based in Massachusetts. Davenny Wyner had a promising career as a soprano, which was ended by an automobile/bicycling accident that damaged her vocal cords. [1] [2]
Davenny Wyner was born October 17, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, where her father, pianist Ward Davenny, was professor of music at Yale University. She was originally trained as a violinist and violist. Following early studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Hartford School of Music, she graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University in 1965 with degrees in both comparative English literature and in music. She entered into vocal studies with Herta Glaz from 1969 to 1975. She received a Fulbright scholarship and a grant from the Ford Foundation, and also won the Walter W. Naumberg Prize. [1] [2]
She made her solo debut as a vocalist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1974. [2] She was a soloist in Georg Handel's Messiah under Sir Colin Davis with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She sang in Ludwig Beethoven's Ninth at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., under Leonard Bernstein, who invited her to perform his own Kaddish Symphony and Songfest[ when? ]. [1] Davenny Wyner made her first New York City Opera appearance as Claudio Monteverdi's Poppea October 23, 1977. She received critical acclaim as the lead role in Maurice Ravel's opera L'Enfant et les Sortileges with Andre Previn; that 1981 recording was reissued in 1995 on the EMI Eminence label. [3] Ms. Wyner made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Woglinde in Das Rheingold under Erich Leinsdorf, on October 8, 1981. [2] She also recorded Erwartung, in 1981.
As a soprano Susan Davenny Wyner had an international career, performing as a soprano soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra London Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and many others. She obtained regular engagements with notable conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Sir Colin Davis, Erich Leinsdorf, André Previn, Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa, Robert Shaw, and Michael Tilson Thomas. She was a successful as a performer of music in both historic and modern vernaculars. She regularly premiered works written especially for her, some of which were recorded for Columbia Masterworks, Angel Records/EMI, Composers Recordings, Inc. (Erwartung) and Musical Heritage Society. [2] In April 1983, her career as a soprano was ended by an automobile/bicycling accident that damaged her vocal cords. [1]
Following her accident, she studied conducting, leading to a subsequent career for which she has received critical acclaim. [4] Davenny-Wyner studied at Yale and Columbia University and received conducting fellowships for study at the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. Since, she has had conducting positions at the New England Conservatory, at the Cleveland Institute of Music, at Wellesley College and Cornell University, where she had once studied, at Brandeis University. In 1998, she was the assistant conductor at Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, a position that was created especially for her. [2]
Since 1999 Davenny Wyner has served as the Music Director and Conductor of the Warren Philharmonic Orchestra in Warren, Ohio. [5] She also leads two opera companies as Music Director and Conductor: Opera Western Reserve in Youngstown, Ohio, since its creation in 2004 [6] and the Boston Midsummer Opera since 2007. [4]
Susan Davenny Wyner married Yehudi Wyner (a composer, pianist, conductor, and music educator) in 1967. [7]
André George Previn was a German-American pianist, composer, and conductor. His career had three major genres: Hollywood films, jazz, and classical music. In each he achieved success, and the latter two were part of his life until the end. In movies, he arranged and composed music. In jazz, he was a celebrated trio pianist, a piano-accompanist to singers of standards, and pianist-interpreter of songs from the "Great American Songbook". In classical music, he also performed as a pianist but gained television fame as a conductor, and during his last thirty years created his legacy as a composer of art music.
Erich Leinsdorf was an Austrian-born American conductor. He performed and recorded with leading orchestras and opera companies throughout the United States and Europe, earning a reputation for exacting standards as well as an acerbic personality. He also published books and essays on musical matters.
Lorin Varencove Maazel was an American conductor, violinist and composer. He began conducting at the age of eight and by 1953 had decided to pursue a career in music. He had established a reputation in the concert halls of Europe by 1960 but, by comparison, his career in the U.S. progressed far more slowly. He served as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic, among other posts. Maazel was well-regarded in baton technique and possessed a photographic memory for scores. Described as mercurial and forbidding in rehearsal, he mellowed in old age.
L'enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties is an opera in one act, with music by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by Colette. It is Ravel's second opera, his first being L'heure espagnole. Written from 1917 to 1925, L'enfant et les sortilèges was first performed in Monte Carlo in 1925 conducted by Victor de Sabata.
L'heure espagnole is a French one-act opera from 1911, described as a comédie musicale, with music by Maurice Ravel to a French libretto by Franc-Nohain, based on Franc-Nohain's 1904 play ('comédie-bouffe') of the same name The opera, set in Spain in the 18th century, is about a clockmaker whose unfaithful wife attempts to make love to several different men while he is away, leading to them hiding in, and eventually getting stuck in, her husband's clocks. The title can be translated literally as "The Spanish Hour", but the word "heure" also means "time" – "Spanish Time", with the connotation "How They Keep Time in Spain".
Rinat Shaham is an Israeli born mezzo-soprano who has received numerous accolades for her international operatic, concert and recital performances.
Yehudi Wyner is an American composer, pianist, conductor and music educator.
Nicole Cabell is an American opera singer. She is best known as the 2005 winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.
Karina Gauvin is a Canadian soprano who has made several recordings and is especially recognised for her interpretation of Baroque music. Opera News stated that, "Gauvin knows how to rivet an audience in opera and concert. She has been a queen of Baroque opera for years. Her personality is big enough to dominate her elaborate wigs and costumes, and her soprano voice is like a clear, refreshing and inexhaustible spring that darts and sparkles around any ornamental obstacle in its way."
Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17, is a one-act monodrama in four scenes by Arnold Schoenberg to a libretto by Marie Pappenheim. Composed in 1909, it was not premiered until 6 June 1924 in Prague conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as the soprano. The opera takes the unusual form of a monologue for solo soprano accompanied by a large orchestra. In performance, it lasts for about half an hour. It is sometimes paired with Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911), as the two works were roughly contemporary and share similar psychological themes. Schoenberg described Erwartung, saying "the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour."
D'Anna Fortunato is an American mezzo-soprano. She has long been an admired favorite on the American orchestral-concert scene, while establishing herself as a respected operatic artist as well. Of her New York City Opera debut in Handel's Alcina, the New Yorker called her "a Handelian of crisp accomplishment".
Bethany Beardslee is an American and is a grandmother to ex model Ella Winham (quoter of “nothing cares”. soprano she is particularly noted for her collaborations with major 20th-century composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, George Perle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and her performances of great contemporary classical music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern. Her legacy amongst midcentury composers was as a "composer's singer"—for her commitment to the highest art of new music. Milton Babbitt said of her "She manages to learn music no one else in the world can. She can work, work, work." In a 1961 interview for Newsweek, Beardslee flaunted her unflinching repertoire and disdain for commercialism: "I don't think in terms of the public... Music is for the musicians. If the public wants to come along and study it, fine. I don't go and try to tell a scientist his business because I don't know anything about it. Music is just the same way. Music is not entertainment."
New England String Ensemble was founded in 1993 by violinist Peter Stickel and cellist John Bumstead to champion strings in performance and education and is one of the country's leading professional string orchestras. The ensemble consists of 26 professional string musicians who perform four concert programs a year at both the Rogers Center for the Arts in North Andover, Massachusetts and New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in Boston, Massachusetts. It is led by conductor and music director, Federico Cortese, and performs music from the 17th century to the present.
Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz is a Norwegian-Italian operatic soprano.
Kate Lindsey is a mezzo-soprano opera singer from the United States. She is married to the documentary filmmaker Olly Lambert.
Joseph Kalichstein was an American classical pianist who performed in the concerto, solo recital and chamber music repertoire, the latter mainly with Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson in the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. He was also a professor at the Juilliard School in New York.
Lorin Hollander is an American classical concert pianist. He has performed with virtually all of the major symphony orchestras in the United States and many around the world. A New York Times critic called him in 1964 "the leading pianist of his generation."
Pamela Helen Stephen was a British classical mezzo-soprano, who sang in operas and oratorios.
Elliot Madore is a Canadian lyric baritone with an international operatic career.
Jocelyne Taillon was a French lyrical singer.
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