Tenor Nicholas Phan Launches 2017-18 Season in Chicago with Sixth Annual Collaborative Arts Festival (Sep 6-9); Other Highlights Include New Artistic Directorships, Multiple Debuts, Repertoire from Lute Songs to Title Role of Bernstein’s Candide
Described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as an artist whose “voice takes complete possession of the music,” tenor Nicholas Phan once again launches his new season in Chicago, curating the sixth annual Collaborative Arts Festival, which he co-founded in 2010 and of which he is artistic director. This year’s four-day festival (Sep 6-9), “Myths and Legends,” explores a theme of storytelling and fantasy and features guest artist Susanna Phillips in a solo recital and master class. Phan also adds two new artistic associations to his portfolio this season, when he becomes the first singer to serve as Guest Artistic Director of Laguna Beach Music Festival, and serves as Guest Director of Apollo’s Fire, where he will oversee one of the fall subscription weeks with this acclaimed Cleveland-based baroque orchestra.
In concert, Phan makes his Herbst Theater recital debut with San Francisco Performances, where he has served as the vocal artist-in-residence since 2014. The Herbst program, which explores music of the Belle Époque, includes Fauré’s La bonne chanson and Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées, both of which will be featured on his next recording for Avie Records, slated for release in April 2018. Throughout the season, Phan will perform with orchestras big and small in the wide range of repertoire that prompted Opera News to call him “both secure and chameleonic in identity.” Highlights include debuts with A Far Cry, Minnesota Orchestra, France’s Orchestre d’Auvergne, and the Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo led by music director Marin Alsop, marking Phan’s first performances in South America. He also performs with The Knights, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony under Riccardo Muti, and in the title role of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide with the Toronto Symphony, as part of the world-wide celebration of the centenary of the composer’s birth. Rounding out Phan’s season is a return to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to perform Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes in New York and on tour in Chicago, as well as a collaborative performance with the Jasper String Quartet, singing arrangements of Schubert Lieder and Britten folksongs.
Artistic Directorships
Phan’s work with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago is the product of his passionate commitment to reinvigorating the song recital. As the Chicago Classical Review has observed, “The vocal recital is less of a locally endangered species thanks to the yeoman efforts of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago.” Joining Phan to perform at the festival this year are soprano Sarah Shafer, bass-baritone Douglas Williams, and soprano Susanna Phillips (who headlines the festival’s annual solo recital), as well as pianists Myra Huang and festival co-founder Shannon McGinnis. Among the recital programs are Schubert Lieder on texts by the great German Romantic poets Mayrhofer, Schiller and Goethe that retell the myths of ancient Greece, and a program of fantastical legends by composers ranging from Schumann and Duparc to Jake Heggie. Phan recorded some of the repertoire featured in the festival on his own solo album, Gods and Monsters, which garnered a “Critic’s Choice” citation in the May 2017 issue of Opera News: “Nicholas Phan and Myra Huang offer musical storytelling at its finest in a new recital of legends, tales and horror stories drawn from the nineteenth-century German Lieder repertoire. In addition to superb narrative skills and dramatic conviction, Phan possesses enough musical imagination and vocal daring to bring each story and character vividly to life, and Huang matches the tenor with a pianistic arsenal of colors and attacks, controlled by her astonishing technique.” For further information about the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, visit http://caichicago.org.
As the first singer to serve as Guest Artistic Director of the Laguna Beach Music Festival, Phan joins a lineage of superb artists that has included Joshua Bell, Edgar Meyer, Jennifer Koh, Shai Wosner, Claude Frank, Brooklyn Rider, Lynn Harrell, Johannes Moser, and Jeffrey Kahane. In the first of three concerts (Feb 9-11), Phan explores one of the most fruitful musical relationships of all time – that between Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The following night’s program features the world premiere of a multimedia event built around Leoš Janáček’s powerful Diary of One Who Disappeared, as well as the world premiere of a new song cycle by composer Missy Mazzoli, co-commissioned by both the Laguna Beach Music Festival and CAIC. For the third and final concert Phan is joined by special guests for a musical road-trip through the great American songbook, with songs ranging from Bernstein and Copland to Broadway, Joan Baez, and Patty Griffin.
After hugely successful performances with Apollo’s Fire as the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion, Phan returns to Cleveland this fall to lead the group in another program related to a previous solo recording: “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: Nicholas Phan and Friends Perform A Painted Tale.” Phan acts as both Guest Director and soloist for the performance, a “pastiche song cycle” assembled by the tenor himself. The program tells the story of love gained and then lost, through selections by Dowland, Purcell, and other master composers of the English Renaissance and early Baroque. The Chicago Tribune named Phan’s recording of A Painted Tale one of the best classical albums of 2015, and Gramophone named it an “Editor’s Choice.”
Previous Season Highlights
Last season, Phan led the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago’s fifth annual Collaborative Works Festival, which focused on the influence of Paul Verlaine’s poetry on the realm of French mélodie. He made his Asian debut in September, performing and recording Bach Cantatas with Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan in Kobe and Tokyo, and in February he debuted at London’s famed Wigmore Hall with his long-time recital partner, pianist Myra Huang. He also made a debut with the Nashville Symphony, with performances and a live recording of John Harbison’s Requiem led by the orchestra’s music director Giancarlo Guerrero, and made his title role debut in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and Esa-Pekka Salonen, as part of their residency at Cal Performances. About the latter, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, “Tenor Nicholas Phan threw himself into the title role with a valiant blend of elegance and almost heedless fervor.” The tenor returned to the Philadelphia Orchestra, collaborating with its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and rejoined the Cleveland Orchestra for performances of Bach’s St. John Passion led by music director Franz Welser-Möst. Finally, he performed Beethoven folk song arrangements and Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge on tour with Musicians from the Marlboro Festival, where he was in residence during the summers of 2007-2010; the tour included stops at Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Reporting on the tour, the Boston Globe called Phan, “One of the world’s most remarkable singers,” adding:
“The reasons for his success were apparent during an incisive performance of ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ Vaughan Williams’s song cycle for tenor, piano, and string quartet. … One could admire, in Phan’s performance, the variety of shadings in his voice, the naturalness of his phrasing, and the evenness of his vocal range. But that was all secondary to the sheer intensity with which he inflected every word. He was, in an odd way, almost as impressive in a selection of five of Beethoven’s settings of Irish folk songs for voice and piano trio. These are not Beethoven’s most distinguished creations, and the rather banal texts suffer in comparison to Housman’s. But there was no less depth in Phan’s artistic investment, and he made the stories these songs told compelling and poignant.”
High-res photos can be downloaded here.
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Nicholas Phan: 2017-18 engagements
Sep 6-9
Chicago, IL
Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago
2017 Collaborative Works Festival: Myths & Legends
Artistic Director
Sep 6: “Schubert & the Greeks” (The Poetry Foundation)
Sep 9: “Fairy Tales & Legends” (Gottlieb Hall)
Sep 23 & 24
Los Angeles, CA
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles Master Chorale / Grant Gershon
Orff: Carmina Burana
Oct 5
Brooklyn, NY
BRIC
The Knights / Eric Jacobsen
Britten: Les Illuminations
Oct 12-14
São Paulo, Brazil
Sala São Paulo
Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo / Marin Alsop
Britten: War Requiem
Oct 17
Boston, MA
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Opening celebration for Henry James & American Painting
John Musto, piano
TBD: selected songs
Oct 24
Chicago, IL
Harris Theater at Millennium Park
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Brahms: Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52
Schumann: selected Lieder
Oct 29
New York, NY
Alice Tully Hall
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Brahms: Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52
Nov 9
Akron, OH
First United Methodist
Apollo’s Fire
A Painted Tale
Nov 10 & 11
Cleveland, OH
St. Paul’s Episcopal
Apollo’s Fire
A Painted Tale
Nov 12
Rocky River, OH
Rocky River Presbyterian
Apollo’s Fire
A Painted Tale
Nov 30
Boston, MA
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
John Musto, piano
Cabaret: “Picturing Women”
Dec 9 & 10
Minneapolis, MN
Orchestra Hall
Minnesota Orchestra / Helmuth Rilling (debut)
Bach: Christmas Oratorio
Dec 14
San Francisco, CA
Herbst Theater
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra / Nicholas McGegan
Handel: Joseph and his Brethren
Dec 15
Palo Alto, CA
First United Methodist Church
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra / Nicholas McGegan
Handel: Joseph and his Brethren
Dec 16 & 17
Berkeley, CA
First Congregational Church
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra / Nicholas McGegan
Handel: Joseph and his Brethren
Dec 21 & 22
Philadelphia, PA
Verizon Hall
Kimmel Center
Philadelphia Orchestra / Cristian Măcelaru
Handel: Messiah
Jan 6
Ann Arbor, MI
University Musical Society
Martin Katz, piano
What’s in a Song?
TBD: selected songs
Jan 10-12
New York, NY
Alliance Française
Da Camera of Houston
A Proust Sonata
Debussy: selected songs
Fauré: selected songs
Hahn: selected songs
Jan 19
Boston, MA
Jordan Hall
A Far Cry
Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn & strings
Jan 28
San Jose, CA
Trianon Theater
San Jose Chamber Music Society
Jasper String Quartet
Schubert: selected Lieder
Britten: selected songs
Feb 9-11
Laguna Beach, CA
Laguna Beach Playhouse
Laguna Beach Music Festival
Guest Artistic Director
Feb 9: “Robert, Clara & Johannes”
Feb 10: “Diaries – The Art of the Confessional”
Feb 11: “The American Spirit”
Feb 25
Skokie, IL
North Shore Center
Music of the Baroque / Jane Glover
Handel: Esther
Feb 27
Chicago, IL
Harris Theater at Millennium Park
Music of the Baroque / Jane Glover
Handel: Esther
March 10
Houston, TX
Cullen Theater
Mercury / Antoine Plante
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
March 22-24
Chicago, IL
Symphony Center
Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Riccardo Muti
Schubert: Mass in E-flat, D. 950
April 12
San Francisco, CA
Herbst Theater
San Francisco Performances
Myra Huang, piano
Debussy: Ariettes Oubliées
Fauré: La bonne chanson
- Boulanger: selections from Clairières dans le ciel
Hahn: selected songs
Duparc: selected songs
April 14
Las Vegas, NV
Reynolds Hall
Las Vegas Philharmonic / Donato Cabrera
Orff: Carmina Burana
April 21
Cleveland, OH
Gamble Hall
Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival / Dirk Garner
Bach: St. John Passion
April 26 & 28
Toronto, Canada
Roy Thomson Hall
Toronto Symphony Orchestra / Bramwell Tovey
Bernstein: Candide
May 24 & 25
Clermont-Ferrand, France
Opéra Théâtre Clermont-Ferrand
Orchestre d’Auvergne / Jean-Jacques Kantorow
Britten: Serenade for tenor, horn & strings
Finzi: Farewell to Arms
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© 21C Media Group, September 2017