Name: MAIN STAGE: L’Alphabet | Donald Berman, piano, and Susan Narucki, soprano | Faculty Artist Recital
Start: 2025-09-19T19:00:00
Location: Longy School of Music of Bard College

Donald Berman

Susan Narucki

Longy School of Music of Bard College

The opening to Albert Giraud’s poem L’Alphabet describes the career of Claire Delbos, pseudonym for the wife of Olivier Messiaen, whose music was unheard and unrecognized during her career because of her gender. Susan Narucki, soprano and Donald Berman, piano, offer her music alongside modern composers Georgina Derbez (Mexico), Judith Weir (Great Britain ), Sharon Huang (China), and Marti Epstein (US), with music that poses questions about the meaning of gestures, from a piece probing how we make sense of learning (“The Art of Touching the Keyboard”), to how we escape oppression (“The Intelligence of Flowers,”), how we reconcile longing for home in a new land (“A Flowing Brook in Hunan”) to Derbez’ settings of Emily Dickinson and Giraud, which question language fragmented into utterance.