Here's a little something sung by my wife Kathy and me. A lot of people seem to assume that our life is one long love duet - and while we love each other very much, we actually sing together rather little .... in public or even in private. But maybe that's why we take such
My brother Steve and his partner Scott adopted their wonderful son Henry from Cambodia. That's one big reason why I have long been fascinated by the experience of overseas adoption- which is why I was so thrilled at the opportunity to interview author Jeff Gammage, the author of an amazing book called "China Ghosts: My
This is a stupendous song from 20th century composer Samuel Barber - and this performance of it comes from my graduate voice recital in the spring of 1984. I sang three Barber settings of poetry by James Joyce. Whenever I listen to this and other excerpts from this performance, I'm reminded of the
This is one of the most precious mementos I have - because it's one of my only singing samples dating all the way back to high school. This is a snippet from Atlantic High School's production of Jerome Kern's "Showboat." It's interesting for me to hear how much I matured, vocally, between this performance
Here's another encore from my Luther senior recital in 1981- my friend Amy Nichols and I singing a duet from Jerome Kern's "Showboat," which we sang when we were classmates at Atlantic High School. We sang three duets in the show - "You are love," "Only Make Believe," and "Why do I love you"
I had the oddest experience yesterday during opera workshop when I was coaching some of our young singers in the final section of the act two finale of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. It's a glorious passage of music- challenging but also incredibly fun to both sing and play- and I was having a
Not long ago, I came across the recording of the 75th anniversary gala concert of the Carthage College, from the spring of 2001. We organized a weekend event in which alumni of the choir were invited to come back to Carthage and comprise a special mass choir that would join with the current choir
This is a real blast from the past for me- it's the final encore of my senior voice recital at Luther College back in mid-November 1981. (It doesn't seem possible that this was 34 years ago.) After music of Benedetto Marcello, Johannes Brahms, Georges Bizet, Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams, I surprised the audience
Recently, I came across the recording of the joint faculty voice recital that I did with my colleague and friend Amy Haines. The year was 2004. She sang Ned Rorem (definitely doing the heavy lifting of the evening) while I did all ten of the Old American Songs of Aaron Copland. This is the
Here is the final movement of my "Short Requiem." Almost the entire work is in the uncommon time signature of 5/4. I did that because the work was composed tin memory of someone who had been tragically killed in a motorcycle accident- and I thought the asymmetry of the 5/4 meter could help convey the
