“New Songs for an Old Poet” is a series of four concerts spanning May through December 2025. Organized by long-time Valley vocalist Peter W. Shea, who is also the principal performer, the series presents an enormous variety of songs, all of them musical settings of the great nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose verses have been set to music more than any other poet. All are works that Shea has in some way helped to bring into the world, either by suggestion, commission, or premiere, as part of his thirty- year project on Heine and the music he continues to inspire.
“The Noble Heine,” the second concert in the series, showcases 21 Heine settings by the versatile and well-known local pianist and composer Clifton J. ”Jerry” Noble, Jr. The program includes the 16-song Heine Song Cycle that Noble wrote in 2016 in tribute to the great Romantic composer Robert Schumann, as well as four new a cappella works he composed this year for Cantabile, a vocal sextet of which Shea is a founding member. Mezzo-soprano Justina Golden, a former Cantabile member, is rejoining the group for this concert, and will reprise a duet with Shea that Noble composed for the two of them in 2017. The other members of Cantabile are soprano Maki Matsui, mezzo-soprano Katrina Turner, tenor James Mead, and baritone Aidan Linden. Shea will sing half of the song cycle, with the other vocalists sharing the remainder, and Noble will accompany both cycle and duet on the piano.
Later concerts in the series:
“The Parting Summer,” Saturday, Sept. 13, music by pianist and composer Kaeza Fearn, presently of Cape Cod, featuring her 2009 song cycle of the same name, sung by Shea with pianist Monica Jakuc Leverett, plus a few of Fearn’s piano works.
“Seas, Birds and Trees,” Saturday, Dec. 13 (Heine’s 228th birthday), an evocative potpourri of works by a dozen composers, with several sea-related solo songs, a suite for piano four-hands, and four pieces for voice and multiple instruments, with a cast of thousands (well, nine really).
Earlier concert:
“Heinrich Heine Far and Near,” Saturday, May 10, featured sixteen songs by thirteen composers from Germany, Canada, New York, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts, that ranged widely in style, mood, and tonality. Several were sung in English translation. Shea was joined by mezzo soprano and guitarist Justina Golden, pianist Brenda Moore Miller, pianist and guitarist Clifton J. Noble, Jr., and soprano Junko Watanabe.
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