DUREY REDISCOVERED to Premiere Uncovered Manuscripts at NYU's La Maison Francaise

An ensemble of artists committed to exploring the rarely heard music of Louis Durey present six of his unpublished manuscripts, including four North American premieres, on Saturday, February 4 at 4:00 p.m. at La Maison Française at New York University as a prelude to a recording to be released this May by New Focus Records.

Baritones Jesse Blumberg and Sidney Outlaw, and tenor William Burden are joined by collaborative pianist Jocelyn Dueck, who collected the songs from original manuscripts sent to her by the Durey family over a fourteen year period. The forthcoming recording will feature forty one previously unrecorded songs by Durey.

Louis Durey, a member of "Les Six" - a band of friends who created music in Paris during and after the First World War - wrote songs set to poetry by Mallarmé and Heine, Éluard, Hikmet and Audisio, and Langston Hughes, among others, and his music reflects the trajectory of the 20th century, exploring the political climate of the era. Spanning nearly four decades, Durey's lyrical songs epitomize the simple writing style of Les Six, which sparked political conversation through their texts.

The concert includes the North American premieres of Durey's works Trois poèmes de Paul Valéry, Quatre stances de Jean Moréas, Quatre poèmes de Minuit with text by Gabriel Audisio, and Une Femme du Sud Chante with text by Langston Hughes. Also on the program is Six Madrigaux de Mallarmé, Deux poèmes d'Ho-Chi-Minh, and Grève de la Faim with text by Nazim Hikmet.

Tickets for this concert - $20 for general admission and $10 with a student ID - can be reserved through La Maison Française by calling 212-998-8750 or emailing maison.francaise@nyu.edu.

Program Information:

Durey Rediscovered

Saturday, February 4 at 4:00 p.m.

La Maison Française
New York University
16 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003

LOUIS DUREY

Trois poèmes de Paul Valéry*
Quatre stances de Jean Moréas*
Quatre poèmes de Minuit* with poem by Gabriel Audisio
Une Femme du Sud Chante* with poem by Langston Hughes
Six Madrigaux de Mallarmé
Deux poèmes d'Ho-Chi-Minh
Grève de la Faim with poem by Nazim Hikmet

* denotes a North American premiere

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Baritone Jesse Blumberg enjoys a busy schedule of opera, concerts, and recitals, performing repertoire from the Renaissance and Baroque to the 20th and 21st centuries. He has performed roles at Minnesota Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Atlanta Opera, Boston Early Music Festival, and at London's Royal Festival Hall. Jesse has made concert appearances with American Bach Soloists, Boston Baroque, Apollo's Fire, and on Lincoln Center's American Songbook series, and has performed recitals with the New York Festival of Song, Marilyn Horne Foundation, and Mirror Visions Ensemble. Jesse's 2016-2017 season includes debuts at Arion Baroque, Early Music Vancouver, and Opera Atelier, guest appearances with the baroque string band ACRONYM, and leading roles at the 2017 Boston Early Music Festival. He has been featured on over a dozen commercial recordings, including a newly released Winterreise with pianist Martin Katz. Jesse is also the founder and artistic director of Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York City.

American tenor William Burden has won an outstanding reputation in a wide-ranging repertoire throughout Europe and North America. He has appeared in many prestigious opera houses in the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Los Angeles Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Washington National Opera, Seattle Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Santa Fe Opera, Cincinnati Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera, New Orleans Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Opéra National de Paris, Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Thèâtre du Châtelet, Bayerische Staatsoper, Berliner Staatsoper, Madrid's Teatro Real, the Netherlands Opera, and the Saito Kinen Festival. His many roles include the title roles in The Contes d'Hoffmann, Faust, Pelléas et Mélisande, The Rake's Progress, Roméo et Juliette, Béatrice and Bénédict, Candide, and Acis and Galatea; Loge in Das Rheingold, Laca in Jenufa, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Aschenbach in Death in Venice, Don Jose in Carmen, Pylade in Iphigénie en Tauride, Gerald in Lakmé, Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, Nemorino in L'elisir d'amore, Nerone in L'incoronazione di Poppea, Ferrando in Cosí fan tutte, Narraboth in Salome, and Lensky in Eugene Onegin.

Lauded by The New York Times as a "terrific singer" with a "deep, rich timbre" and the San Francisco Chronicle as an "opera powerhouse" with a "weighty and forthright" sound, Sidney Outlaw was the Grand Prize winner of the Concurso Internacional de Canto Montserrat Caballe in 2010 and continues to delight audiences in the U.S. and abroad with his rich and versatile baritone and engaging stage presence. A graduate of the Merola Opera Program and the Gerdine Young Artist Program at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, this rising American baritone from Brevard, North Carolina recently added a GRAMMY nomination to his list of accomplishments for the Naxos Records recording of Darius Milhaud's 1922 opera trilogy, L'Orestie d'Eschyle in which he sang the role of Apollo. The 2016-2017 season includes Mercutio inRoméo et Juliette with Madison Opera, Vaughan Williams' Dona nobis pacem with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, a recital with Warren Jones, and a return to the New York Philharmonic.

Pianist Jocelyn Dueck is an inveterate new music interpreter on the New York City circuit, premiering and commissioning works by composers Eve Beglarian, Lisa Bielawa, Tom Cipullo, Corey Dargel, Louis Durey, Matthew Schickele, Daniel Felsenfeld, Judd Greenstein, John Glover, Daron Hagen, Gabriel Kahane and Gilda Lyons, to name a few. Jocelyn has served on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, NYU and Mannes: The New School for Music, doing language preparation for their opera departments as well as teaching diction. As a coach, Jocelyn has served on the music staffs at Glimmerglass Opera and Seattle Opera. Honors and awards include grants from the Classical Recording Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Meet the Composer MetLife Creative Connections, American Composers Forum Encore, a Tanglewood Music Center Fellowship, and a Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade grant with her pianist sibling trio, Dueck Three for their concert tour of China. She is the leading expert on Durey's songs in North America, having premiered the greater part of these cycles over the past decade. A devotee of language study through music, Jocelyn is the founder of The Center for Language in Song, an institute dedicated to the art of song performance.

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