Songs of Her Own: Concert of Women Composers

Soprano Elisabeth Harrington begins the HSU Music Department season with a program of vocal works by women composers.

"Most of these composers are fairly well know in academic circles," Harrington said, " but not to the general public. My goal was to highlight some of my favorite composers."

Harrington was most recently seen and heard playing the role of Alice Beane in the Humboldt Light Opera production of Titanic: A New Musical. She is Assistant Professor of Voice at HSU, and directs the Opera Workshop. In addition to her opera and classical music performances, including two seasons with the Aspen Music Festival Opera Theater, she was a singer and flute player in a blues and bluegrass band.

The program she presents in the HSU Faculty Artist Series features women composers from the 19th and 20th centuries (Alma Mahler, Pauline Viardot) as well as contemporaries (Libby Larsen, Delores White and the comedienne Anna Russell.)

She is accompanied by pianist John Chernoff. They will repeat this program the following week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The composers

Alma Mahler was married to the famous composer and conductor, Gustave Mahler. Although she had already written music, Alma agreed to forgo a career as a composer after her marriage. However, after her serious depression and an affair with a young architect (Walter Gropius), Gustave reconsidered, and was instrumental in five of her compositions being completed and published. After his death, she married Gropius (who later achieved fame), divorced him and married novelist Franz Werfel. She came to the U.S. with him during World War II, and stayed on after his death. She was a well-known cultural figure in New York until her death in 1964.

Harrington’s program features the work of another woman famous for her romances: the Spanish-born 19th century opera singer, Pauline Viardot. Though she married Louis Viardot in 1840, her conquests included writer Ivan Turgenev and composer Hector Berlioz. But it was her voice that inspired several famous composers to write for her. Besides assisting in these compositions, she wrote three collections of music, and composed an opera after her retirement from the stage.

Also represented are contempory composers Libby Larsen, author of more than 200 works and praised by USA Today as "the only English-speaking composer since Benjamin Britten who matches great verse with fine music so intelligently and expressively," and Chicago-born Delores White, a composer with numerous published works, and a former teacher who lectures on women in music, Afro-Cuban music and dance, and African American arts.

Harrington’s program concludes with three humorous songs by the English-Canadian singer and comedienne, Anna Russell.

Media: Eureka Reporter.