Andrew Garland is a star singer beginning to burst forth. I am his devoted fan and supporter. Don’t miss this new recording!! — Marilyn Horne
“This Collection of four contemporary song cycles by American composers merits repeated listening, for the works themselves as well as for the highly accomplished performances by baritone Andrew Garland and pianist Donna Loewy.” — Opera News
The Moon is a Mirror Jake Heggie/Vachel Lindsay
- The Strength of the Lonely
- What the Miner in the Desert Said
- The Old Horse and the City
- What the Forrester Said
- What the Snowman Said
A Heartland Portrait Stephen Paulus/Ted Kooser
- Flying at Night
- At Midnight
- An August Night
- Porch Swing in September
- A Summer Night
Men With Small Heads Lori Laitman/ Thomas Lux
- Men With Small Heads
- Refrigerator, 1957
- A Small Tin Parrot Pin
- Snake Lake
America 1968 Tom Cipullo/Robert Hayden
- Monet’s Waterlilies
- Hey Nonny No
- The Point
- The Whipping
- Those Winter Sundays
- Frederick Douglass
American baritone Andrew Garland has been saluted by The New York Times as having a “distinctly American presence” with a “big voice” who is “an able and comfortable performer, and a sincere one,” and by Opera News as having “coloratura [which] bordered on the phenomenal as he dashed through the music’s intricacies with his warm baritone, offering plenty of elegance and glamour in his smooth acting.”
Past highlights include New York City Opera, Seattle Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, The Atlanta Symphony, Boston Lyric Opera and Fort Worth Opera.
Garland is best known for his highly communicative style of singing. Equally at home in opera, concert and recital, he brings to each genre a powerful voice and extremely sensitive delivery.
Mr. Garland is the winner of the Lavinia Jensen Competiton, Washington International Music Competition, American Traditions Competition, the William C. Byrd Competition, the Opera Columbus Competition, NATS New England competition and was a prize winner in the Jose Iturbi and Montreal International Music Competitions and McCammon, Gerda Lissner and Palm Beach Opera competitions.
Donna Hallen Loewy is Field Service Professor of Collaborative Piano and Accompanist-in-Residence at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio. A “superlative accompanist” (Virginia Gazette), Ms. Loewy has been the official pianist for the Metropolitan Opera Auditions in southern Ohio, the International Clarinet Conference, Congress of Strings, International Double Reed Society, Yamaha Young Performing Artists Winners Recitals, Tubamania (Sydney, Australia) and International Tuba and Euphonium Conference. She has worked as an opera coach with the Israel Vocal Arts Institute, Opera Theatre and Music Festival of Lucca (Italy), International Institute of Vocal Arts (Italy), and Cincinnati Opera. Ms. Loewy prepared and accompanied many top prize winners of the NFMC Young Artist Competition and NATS Artist Awards, as well as Marilyn Horne Foundation sponsored recitals and residencies throughout the country. Baritone Andrew Garland and Ms. Loewy were presented by the Horne Foundation in NY at Carnegie Hall, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas, and performed recitals of Living American Composers at the Phillips Gallery, Huntsville Chamber Music Guild, Cerritos Center Iturbi Series, and Art Song of Wlliamsburg. She has also been on the faculty of SongFest, pianist-in-Residence at New Music on the Point and at the Barcelona Festival of Song. Loewy is the voice consultant and co-author of the Inner Game of Music Vocal Workbook, written with Barry Green. Her recent CD with baritone Andrew Garland, On The Other Shore, featuring the folk song settings of Steven Mark Kohn, on Azica Records, has met with great critical acclaim.
Andrew Garland gave a marvelous rendering of my work A HEARTLAND PORTRAIT. His tone was sure and strong and he projected a wonderful air of confidence with fine attention to phrasing and shaping the work. He captured both the plaintive simplicity as well as the everyday tragedy that comes from the words through the music.
Ted Kooser, the recent Poet Laureate from the U.S. lives in Nebraska and I found his wonderful poems to be both straightforward in that “midwestern” way and also quite dark, layered with various meanings. I have tried to make the words audible and highlighted. The accompaniment can at times be surging and ecstatic, but at other times it is very spare. I hope that I have added a musical dimension to the meaning behind the words by making the listener pause to analyze the thoughts and images that the singer and pianist are projecting. Hopefully, all of this may cause us to reflect on “how simple, how perfect it seems.” —Stephen Paulus
Andrew Garland is a wonderful young singer. His beautiful voice and deep intelligence result in riveting performances. It’s been a pleasure to work with him.
My daughter Diana introduced me to the work of Thomas Lux, one of her favorite poets. When I first read “Men with Small Heads” I thought the text might be impossible to set to music. However, as I delved further into Mr. Lux’s poems I came to appreciate their incredible structure, and my imagination ran wild. Several musical motifs dominate and unify Men with Small Heads. (The piano quotation of America The Beautiful at the end is intentional.) Refrigerator, 1957 is a musical fantasy. Reminiscent of French songs, the opening veers into a 3/4 section as the subject, “maraschino cherries,” is introduced. A parody of Italian opera (combined with other humorous tidbits) leads to a lyric and touching close. Imitation figures prominently in A Small Tin Parrot Pin as the piano punctuates the singer’s offbeat observations. Snake Lake uses hissing to emphasize the recurring “s” sound in the poem. The “squiggly” musical figures employed in both voice and piano symbolize swimming and water, and the accented notes are meant to portray the lurking danger—and sting—of a snake bite. —Lori Laitman
Andy Garland is the kind of musical champion song composers dream of finding: a true song stylist who is passionate, creative, quick, inquisitive and possesses a beautiful lyric baritone. —Jake Heggie
The Moon is a Mirror was commissioned by Credit Suisse for the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and was first performed in anorchestrated version in Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore in October 2001. The piano/vocal version was premiered in Jan 2002 by Terfel and pianist Malcolm Martineau at Barbican Hall in London, and subsequently received its US premiere as part of Terfel’s Carnegie Hall debut in March of 2002. Terfel had specifically requested songs on texts that allowed him to inhabit fantastical characters, and Heggie offered settings of several moon poems by the American poet Vachel Lindsay. The composer had previously set several Lindsay poems in SONGS TO THE MOON for mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade.
America 1968 was composed especially for Andy Garland and Donna Loewy. Their performance—so deeply committed, virtuosic, and, above all, true—is how I dreamed the piece would sound. Andy and Donna are, quite simply, national treasures in the service of American song
To think back on 1968 today is to be flooded with powerful images: two assassinations, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Apollo 8 orbiting the moon, the black power salute of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal-stand of the Mexico City Olympics. I found in Hayden’s eloquent poetry a bridge to my memories of the time – and to my own ambivalence about the era. In Hayden’s poems, the redemptive powers of art and nature can assuage the reader even when “the news from Selma and Saigon poison the air like fallout.” But the rhythms and cadences of urban violence can be heard in Lord Riot, and the casual, misdirected cruelty of those who have themselves been victims finds its expression in The Whipping. Those Winter Sundays is perhaps Hayden’s most famous poem. In it, one feels, belatedly, an appreciation for the sacrifices of another, as one does, perhaps even more viscerally, in Frederick Douglass. To me, Hayden is at his most moving in The Point, celebrating a transcendent meeting of light and water, a moment when people are “held in shining, like memories in the mind of God.” —Tom Cipullo
COMPOSERS
Jake Heggie is the American composer of the operas Moby-Dick, Dead Man Walking, Three Decembers, The End of the Affair and To Hell and Back, as well as the stage works For a Look or a Touch and At the Statue of Venus. He has also composed more than 200 songs, as well as concerti, chamber music, choral and orchestral works. His works are championed internationally by many of the most celebrated singers of our time, including Isabel Bayrakdarian, Joyce Castle, Stephen Costello, Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, Ben Heppner, Patti LuPone, Robert Orth, Kiri Te Kanawa, Morgan Smith, Frederica von Stade, Talise Trevigne, and Bryn Terfel, to name a few. Moby-Dick, which recently received its 2010 world premiere in Dallas, was commissioned by The Dallas Opera with San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera. www.jakeheggie.com
Lori Laitman is one of America’s most widely performed composers of vocal music. She has composed two operas, an oratorio, choral works and over 200 songs, setting the words of classical and contemporary poets. Laitman has been featured on Thomas Hampson’s Song of America website and radio series, and The Grove Dictionary of American Music will include an entry on Laitman in their 2012 edition. In May 2013, Opera Colorado will present the professional world premiere of her opera, The Scarlet Letter. For more information, please visit www.artsongs.com and/or www.scarletletteropera.com.
Stephen Paulus has been hailed as “…a bright, fluent inventor with a ready lyric gift.” (The New Yorker) His prolific output of more than 450 works is represented in many genres and commissions have been received from the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, The Houston Symphony and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with subsequent performances coming from the orchestras of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Radio Orchestra. He has served as Composer in Residence for the orchestras of Atlanta, Minnesota, Tucson and Annapolis, and his works have been championed by such eminent conductors as Sir Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, Christoph von Dohanyi, Leonard Slatkin, Yoel Levi, and the late Robert Shaw.
The recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, Tom Cipullo has received commissions from the Mirror Visions Ensemble, SongFest at Pepperdine, the Joy in Singing, Sequitur, Cantori New York, tenor Paul Sperry, mezzo-soprano Mary Ann Hart, the Five Boroughs Music Festival, pianist Jeanne Golan, soprano Martha Guth, the Walt Whitman Project, baritone Jesse Blumberg, the New York Festival of Song, and many others. He has received awards and fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Copland House, the Liguria Study Center (Bogliasco, Italy), the Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), the Oberpfaelzer Kuenstlerhaus (Bavaria), ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and the Jory Copying Program Mr. Cipullo is the composer of one opera, Glory Denied. The work, after the book by journalist Tom Philpott, is based on the true story of America’s longest-held prisoner of war.
Produced by
Glen Roven
Peter Fitzgerald
Richard Cohen
Co-produced and recorded by
Megan Henninger
Mastered by
Peter Fitzgerald and Megan Henninger
Recorded at Sound Associates, New York City
Front, back and booklet covers designed by Charles Wenzelberg
Booklet art direction by Lisa Cuscuna
Photo Portraits of Mr. Garland by Matt Madison Clark
Please note: We have done due diligence meticulously searching out all copyright holders. If we have inadvertently missed contacting a copyright holder, please contact us at GPRrecords.com
GPRrecords, owned by Glen Roven (A&R), Peter Fitzgerald (CEO) and Richard Cohen (CFO,) has in a very short time become one of the most sought after and prestigious Independent Labels in the United States. They routinely place CDs on the Billboard Top 20 lists and in the Amazon Top 10. Concentrating in Classical Music, Broadway Music, Children’s Music and the Spoken Word, its roster of artists reads like a who’s who of American entertainment: Jason Alexander, Christine Baranski, Thomas Bagwell, Lisa Bielawa, Jonathan Beyer, Jesse Blumberg, Zoe Caldwell, Ann Hampton Callaway, Charles Castronovo, Tom Cipullo, Tyne Daly, Geraint Wyn Davis, Lauren Flanigan, Andrew Garland, David Garrison, Joanna Gleason, Ricky Ian Gordon, Daron Hagen, Jake Heggie, Florence Henderson, Barry Humphries, Gabriel Kahane, Lowell Liebermann, Patti LuPone, Kate Mulgrew, Cynthia Nixon, Daniel Okulitch, Luca Pisaroni, Patricia Racette, Chris Sarandon, Paulo Szot, The Runaway Bunny, Talise Trevigne, Kathleen Turner, Ramón Vargas, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. GPRrecords is distributed exclusively by Naxos Records. For the complete CD library, please go to: www.gprrecords.com
