Collaborative Arts Institute Of Chicago Announces Fall 2020 Season

Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago celebrates its tenth anniversary season with fall offerings that include the annual Collaborative Works Festival, two recitals as part of the Lieder Lounge series, and the first installment of a Polish song workshop.

The festival's three concerts and master class feature the work of women composers in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Lieder Lounge series opens in September with a recital featuring Ryan Opera Center alumnus tenor Jonathan Johnson with Ryan Opera Center music director and pianist Craig Terry. A December Lieder Lounge features Chicago native and Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman with fortepianist Yi-heng Yang. As part of CAIC's fall educational programming, Polish-American conductor, keyboardist, and Fulbright Fellowship recipient Michael Pecak gives a lecture on the history and performance of Polish art song.

Due to the continued uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the safety of the artists and audience members as its top priority, CAIC will present all of its fall programming online. Concerts will be pre-recorded and available for 48 hours following their premiere broadcast. This shift to online programming will result in new dates for the Collaborative Works Festival: instead of the previously announced dates, the festival will now occur over four consecutive weekends in October.

2020 Collaborative Works Festival: The Women

Following the success of the 2019 festival, which the Chicago Classical Review praised as "the kind of thoughtful, intelligent programming that should be a model in a city like Chicago," the 2020 Collaborative Works Festival: The Women commemorates the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. Featuring exclusively the works of women composers, the festival explores a wide range of music spanning over four and half centuries, shedding light on a long history of musical pioneers who have been overlooked due to centuries of sexism.

The festival opens October 2 with the broadcast of a Master Class led by Grammy Award-nominated pianist Myra Huang. Acclaimed by Opera News as "among the top accompanists of her generation", and one of the leading women working in the field, Huang will work with Chicago-based young professional singer-pianist duos on repertoire by composers and poets who are women of color.

With a premiere broadcast on October 9, the festival's first concert, Women of the Baroque, presented in partnership with The Poetry Foundation, spotlights the work of women composers of the late Renaissance and Baroque period, including French composers Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Julie Pinel, as well as Italian composers Antonia Bembo, Francesa Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, and Maddalena Casulana, the first woman in history to have an entire book of her music published. Women of the Baroque features performances by soprano Amanda Majeski, bass Anthony Reed, violinist Adriane Post, harpsichordist Mark Shuldiner, lutenist Brandon Jack Acker, cellist Anna Steinhoff, and CAIC Artistic Director and tenor Nicholas Phan, who appears on all three festival concerts.

The festival's second concert, Les Parisiennes, which premieres on October 16, features the works of trailblazing women composers during the years of the Parisian Belle époque, including Nadia Boulanger, Cécile Chaminade, Germaine Tailleferre, and Pauline Viardot. A highlight of this program is a rare complete performance of Lili Boulanger's epic song cycle, Clairières dans le ciel. Les Parisiennes features soprano Janai Brugger, mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms, and pianist Myra Huang.

The festival's closing concert, Modern Women, with a premiere broadcast on October 23, showcases songs by some of today's women composers, as well as American women composers of the 20th century, including Margaret Bonds, Florence Price, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. This program includes Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop's song cycle In Eleanor's Words, based on the writings of Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as the Midwestern Premieres of Errollyn Wallen's Roundel and Iva Bittová's Nezabudka. Modern Women features mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms, baritone Chris Kenney, and CAIC Director of Education and pianist Shannon McGinnis.

CAIC's popular Lieder Lounge series continues with two recitals this Fall. The season opens September 18 with tenor Jonathan Johnson, a recent alumnus of the Lyric Opera's Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center. Johnson is joined by pianist Craig Terry, music director of the Ryan Opera Center, for a program including songs by Benjamin Britten and Henri Duparc.

The Lieder Lounge series continues December 4 with a recital featuring tenor Karim Sulayman and fortepianist Yi-heng Yang. A native of Chicago, Sulayman won the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo Album for his debut recording, Songs of Orpheus. Presented in partnership with the Arts Club of Chicago, the concert will be filmed in the club's beautiful salon and will be a unique opportunity to see this duo perform Schubert Lieder featured on their recent album for Avie Records, Where Only The Stars Can Hear Us.

On November 7, Chicago-based Polish-American conductor and keyboardist Michael Pecak presents a lecture on Polish art song and lyric diction. A former Fulbright Fellowship recipient, Pecak studied the music of 20th and 21st-century composers at the F. Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Polish Studies Center of Indiana University. This lecture is the first in a series of events on this topic, including master classes for singers and pianists and culminating in a performance in 2021.

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