This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Bachelor of Music in Performance. Ms. Infusino is a student of Oral Moses.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1611/thumbnail.jp

Infusino, Christina

Kinney, Marcena

English

DigitalCommons@Kennesaw State University

                                           School of Music  Presents  SENIOR RECITAL  Christina Infusino, soprano  Marcena Kinney, piano       Saturday, December 13, 2008 6:30 pm Dr. Bobbie Bailey & Family Performance Center Performance Hall     Thirty-sixth Concert of the 2008-2009 season                                               Kennesaw State University School of Music  Senior Recital  Christina Infusino, soprano Marcena Kinney, piano   Saturday, December 13, 2008 6:30 pm Dr. Bobbie Bailey & Family Performance Center Performance Hall   PROGRAM  I  Non vi vorrei conoscere (Ruspoli) Alessandro Scarlatti  from Griselda (1660-1725)  Mio caro bene (Haym) George Frideric Handel  from Rodelinda (1685-1759)  Stizzoso, mio stizzoso (Federico) Giovanni Battista Pergolesi   from La Serva Padrona (1710-1736)  II  An Chloë (Jacobi) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart   (1756-1791)  Liebesbotschaft (Rellstab) Franz Schubert  from the Song Cycle Schwanengesang (1797-1828)    Aus den östlichen Rosen (Rückert) Robert Schumann   (1810-1856)  Kennesaw State University  Upcoming Music Events   Tuesday, January 13, 2009 Kennesaw State University Faculty Artist Recital Helen Kim, violin with Robert Henry, piano 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall  Friday, January 16, 2009 Kennesaw State University Faculty Artist Recital David Watkins, piano 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall  Monday, January 19, 2009 Kennesaw State University Chamber Players Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Concert 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall  Thursday, February 12, 2009 Kennesaw State University  Jazz Ensembles 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall   Monday, February 16, 2009 Kennesaw State University  Concert Band and Wind Ensemble 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall  Wednesday, February 18, 2009 Kennesaw State University  Symphony Orchestra 8:00 pm • Bailey Performance Center Performance Hall     For the most current information, please visit http://www.kennesaw.edu/arts/events/                                         Performer Biography  Christina Infusino is pursuing a Bachelor of Music Performance Degree at Kennesaw State University. She became involved in the performing arts as a young teenager singing in chamber and jazz swing choirs, as well as performing in various musicals. After high school, she enrolled at Kennesaw State University where she began to develop her passion for opera and the musical arts. Infusino has performed leading roles in the KSU productions of Gianni Schicchi (Lauretta), Urinetown (Little Sally), Yeomen and the Guard (Kate), Gertrude McFuzz (Gertrude), and Sam I Am (Sam). She has also performed in the KSU productions of Pippin, King of Hearts, and Elixir of Love, with the Roswell Symphony Orchestra, and also the Capital City Opera production of Gianni Schicchi (Gherardina). Infusino was a finalist in the 2004 KSU Concerto Competition, a finalist in the 2003 and 2004 KSU Honors Recital, and a 2007 Irene Ryan candidate at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for her performance in Urinetown (Little Sally). Infusino is currently studying voice with  Dr. Oral Moses. She previously studied with Elizabeth Steege, Nancy Hettinger, and Karen Parks and has also coached with Dr. Russell Young, Bernadine Oliphint, and Dr. Uzee Brown. Infusino plans to attend graduate school in vocal music performance upon graduation from Kennesaw State University and aspires to perform opera and classical music professionally throughout the world.               III  Notre amour (Silvestre) Gabriel Fauré  (1845-1924)  Le colibri (De Lisle) Ernest Chausson  (1855-1899)  Nuit d’étoiles (De Banville) Claude Debussy  (1862-1918)  IV  Vedrai carino (Da Ponte) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  from Don Giovanni (1756-1791)  Saper vorreste (Somma) Giuseppe Verdi  from Un Ballo in Maschera (1813-1901)  V  The Year’s at the Spring (Browning) Amy Beach  from the Song Cycle Three Browning Songs (1867-1944)  He’s Goin’ Away (North Carolina Folk Tune) John Jacob Niles  (1892-1980)  Will o’ the Wisp (Benjamin) Charles Gilbert Spross  (1874-1961)  The Lordly Hudson (Goodman) Ned Rorem (b. 1923)  (b.  1923)  Give me Jesus (Traditional Spiritual) Moses Hogan  (1957-2003)     This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree  Bachelor of Music in Performance. Ms. Infusino is a student of Oral Moses.                                         Program Notes  During the Baroque Era (1600-1750), the most popular style of opera was Opera Seria with subject matter pertaining to heroism or tragedy, particularly Greek tragedy. The primary aria type is called Da Capo, often expressed as ABA’. The structure of the Da Capo text usually consists of a binary construction of two quatrains. The first quatrain (A section) was followed by the second quatrain (B section) and then returned to the A section with added ornamentations and cadenzas. The B section was often set in a contrasting style, including meter, tempo, and various key changes. The aria format was also able to carry a variety of musical treatment in terms of thematic and tonal relationships, accompaniment, ornamentation and dramatic effects because it was “nearly universal and a dramatic effect could be won by playing on its very predictability”.   Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), the most important Italian composer of vocal music of his generation, led the development of the opera seria aria form by simplifying the accompaniment in order to place greater emphasis on the vocal line. His final opera Griselda (1721), contains 41 arias and duets, common for Opera Seria composers of the time, and is based on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccacio’s Il decamerone. Labeled as a dramma per musica in three acts, it was one of the most popular librettos of the 18th century, and it was the last of his operas to survive in complete form. Following common practice during this time, the leading roles were taken by male castrati; Griselda, Costanza, Roberto by male sopranos, Guiltiero and Ottone by male altos, and Corrado by a tenor. A castrato was a type of high voiced, male singer fashioned through the brutal practice of castrating a young boy with a promising voice before he reached puberty.   George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) is widely recognized as one of the greatest and most influential composers of his age, having contributed to every musical genre current in his time including Opera Seria. However, Opera Seria became “obsolete almost within his lifetime”. These are considered to be some of his most neglected works even though the composition of his operas dominated his activities for over 35 years. One of his most successful Opera Serias was Rodelinda (1725), where the heroic roles were taken by male castrati. “Mio caro bene” is the final aria sung by Rodelinda after the villain renounces his throne and returns her to her husband. Handel remained a man of the   “Will o’the Wisp” (1909), have been recorded by Rosa Ponselle and Marian Anderson.  John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) was an American composer, singer, and collector of traditional folk ballads. He began transcribing traditional songs as a teenager and became an important influence on the American folk music revival during the mid-twentieth century. As a songwriter he based many of his songs on traditional sources such as He’s Goin’ Away, “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and “I Wonder as I Wander.” During his later years, Niles published compositional works for chorus and art songs for voice and piano, including a setting of poems by Thomas Merton.   Ned Rorem (b. 1923) is an American composer and writer most influenced by early 20th century musicians such as Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, and Billie Holiday. He studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the Tanglewood Festival, and the Juilliard School. While at Juilliard, he published “The Lordly Hudson” (1948), which was deemed the ‘best published song of the year’ by the Music Library Association, his Overture in C (1948) was awarded the Gershwin Prize. Although his orchestral suite, Air Music (1974) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, Rorem is mainly known as a composer of songs, having written nearly 400 which are considered to be his greatest legacy.   Moses Hogan (1957-2003) was one of the most celebrated contemporary directors and arrangers of spirituals and served as an editor of the new Oxford Book of Spirituals. Hogan received many accomplishments as a concert pianist and for his Moses Hogan Chorale based in New Orleans. His arrangements and original compositions have become staples among high school, college, church, community, and professional choirs worldwide due to his high musical standards and unique repertoire. Some of his arrangements and compositions include “Give Me Jesus,” “The Battle of Jericho,” “Deep River,” and “Elijah Rock.”                                                    theatre and maintained a commitment to compose dramatic music in both his Italian operas and English oratorios.   Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) was a leading figure in the rise and development of the pre-classical style and Italian Opera Buffa during the 18th century. His intermezzo La Serva Padrona (1733) is his most frequently performed and renowned stage work. It consists of two parts that are played between the three acts of his Opera Seria production Il Prigioniero Superbo and contains two singing characters and a mute. Unlike the Opera Seria’s cast of male castrati, this Opera Buffa’s cast consists of a female soprano and a male bass. Both acts include a Da Capo aria and a duet for both characters, and it is in the first intermezzo that Serpina’s first aria “Stizzoso, mio stizzoso” appears. It was so popular that the French and English adopted their own versions, and it survived intact with minimal changes. Although the orchestra consists only of strings and continuo, the work itself is remarkable for its agile melodic phrases and vivacious arias. Yet, it contains less ornamentations and cadenzas than are found in arias written for castrati. Even more remarkable is its plot, which develops credibly drawn characters, providing them possibilities to express themselves naturally within the idiom of the music and for the music to clearly depict the character’s motivation.   The French Art Song, or mélodie, is indebted to the school of French romantic song and poetry during the 19th and early 20th century. The roots of mélodie lie in the romance, which avoided bravura and ornamentation but instead depended on lyrical charm and sensitive performance. A trend for the art songs of Franz Schubert was partly responsible for the transformation of romance into mélodie as French composers began to place increased emphasis on harmonic warmth and more intricate accompaniments. It was in the songs of Chausson, Fauré, and Debussy that mélodie achieved its finest and most original expression. They conveyed a new distinctive character with harmonic innovations and supple melodic lines that grasped the nuances and sensitivity of the text.   The songs Ernest Chausson (1855-1899) include settings of several well-known Parnassian poets, whose writings were characterized by detachment, emphasis on metrical form, and the repression of emotive elements.  “Le colibri” (1882) is characteristic of his first period (1878-1886), where he employed pretty ideas through elegant and   mezzo-sopranos due to the of the color and timbre of their voices and are therefore not often cast by sopranos.   In modern opera these pants roles are less common due to the growing resurgence and training of counter-tenors and male sopranos, who have voices high enough to sing these roles. Directors find that they can cast either male or female singers to perform these roles depending on what is desired for the production. Despite this, there are some trouser roles written in modern opera such as Caliban in Eaton’s The Tempest, Cherubino in Corgliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, and Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.   American music evolved through the efforts of musicians from abroad who established early concert life with urban theatre companies and musical societies. This early concert life was largely dominated by European entrepreneurs and performers leaving very little for American composers. However, Americans continued to compose with many studying with European composers, conductors, musicians, and teachers.   During the early 20th century the idea of composing true American art music finally began to take wing, mainly in 1892 when Dvorák arrived in New York. He urged American composers such as Edward MacDowell, Arthur Farwell, Henry T. Burleigh, and Amy Beach to base their work on indigenous and folk traditions. The combined efforts and influences of these composers led to a musical blending of “Old and New World elements and practices into hybrid forms, distinguished not simply by geography but also by style.”   Amy Beach (1867-1944) was the first American woman to succeed as a composer and pianist. Sh  was a child prodigy as he could accurately sing melodies, improvise harmonic lines, taught herself to read music, and mentally play and compose her own piano pieces all before the age of five. Her parents gave her training in Boston and her development as a pianist was monitored by a circle of prominent American musicians. Amy Beach didn’t turn to composition until after her marriage to Dr. Henry Beach, and produced many well renowned works such as The Year’s at the Spring from the song cycle Three Browning Songs (1900), “Ecstacy” (1893), and Mass in E flat Major (1892). After her husband’s death in 1910, she traveled to Europe establishing a reputation as a leading American performer and composer. She wrote and published approximately 300 works in a wide variety of genres combining late Romantic styles and folk song traditions. Charles Gilbert Spross was a contemporary of Beach well known in his day for his over 1000 songs. Some of these songs, such as his art song                                          shapely melodic lines though unfortunately touching slightly on emotional depth. Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a central figure among Parisian composers even though he did not become well known until his fifties. He consistently stretched tonality to its limits so that even his colleagues thought his compositions were too complicated, modern and advanced. “Notre amour” (c1879) was written within his second period where he began using elements of the whole-tone scale and Impressionism, and created for himself an instant recognizable style and a personal musical language. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) began to compose mélodies in 1879, but did not limit himself only to vocal music. His composition “Nuit d’étoiles” (c1882) comes from his first period before he claimed that “music is neither major nor minor”. His musical innovations attempt to bind modality and tonality, extend and revitalize range, tonal potential, harmony, rhythm, texture, and form.   The German Romantic Lied is an art form born during the Age of the  Renaissance and reached a high point of maturation during the 19th century. The lied was written for voice and piano forming musical ideas through the suggestion of words and stanzas from poetry. Initially it centered on the belief that the song composer should strive for an agreeable and clear reading of the poetic verse and match the nature and content of the words. The lied appealed to all classes of society even as it became more adventurous, but it still retained diatonic clarity and sparse textures. This was evident in Mozart’s works, which displayed wider ranging tonal schemes as compared to most lieder of the 18th century. However, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the lied was truly able to develop with the aid of its greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was primarily from his poems that composers such as Schubert and Schumann could fuse verbal and musical components into a variety of styles and forms, melodic lines, modulations and accompaniment figures. The Romantic Lied mirrored these poetic literary developments through the blending of classical and popular, dramatic and lyric, complex and simple because the composer identified with the “poet, character, scene and singer and strove to concentrate lyric, dramatic and graphic ideas into an integrated whole.”  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) was commissioned after the successful productions of Le Nozze di Figaro in 1786. The libretto for Don Giovanni was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, which he based on versions on Berati’s one-act Don Giovanni, Molière’s Don Juan, and other versions from popular theatre. The opera gained a reputation for exceptional difficulty and became quite popular in several countries due to its entertaining balance of humor and tragedy. Mozart modeled Don Giovanni largely on Le Nozze di Figaro, with its musical form and dramatic technique as well as its design of the arias and ensembles. However, in the second act finale the composition breaks away from buffo norms with its daemonic harmonic language associated with Don Giovanni’s fall into the depths of Hell. Its tragic elements form a new synthesis of buffo and serious styles, which could explain its enduring popularity. However, the attraction may have more to do with the mercurial character of Don Giovanni because unlike the other more three-dimensional characters, he is more two-dimensional and adapts “to the style of each of his victims”. Whereas Zerlina, who loves Masetto though struggles to fight the hypnotizing charms of Don Giovanni, maintains her “style” of the 3/4 or 6/8 meter even as Don Giovanni changes to the same meter during his attempts to woo her. Nevertheless, the opera is governed by a single idea of Don Giovanni’s infringement of society in pursuit of sexual pleasure through comedy and drama, something of which audiences across all generations can find excitement and wonder in watching.   The character of Oscar in Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, is written as a “trouser role” for a female voice. The term “trouser role” is used to define a woman singing and playing the role of an operatic or theatrical male. During the 17th and 18th centuries, important male roles intended for castrati were occasionally sung by women and some of these male roles were written specifically for female singers. As the practice of castration faded, the roles drifted into the trouser role arena that mezzo-sopranos, contraltos, and sometimes even sopranos would fill. Composers such as Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Verdi wrote important male roles for varying female voice types as the castrati gradually disappeared even though they had written many operatic roles originally intended for castrati.  Trouser roles are usually limited only to adolescent characters because the higher voice of a female, who is dressed in men’s clothing, signifies to the audience that the character is a young man whose voice has not yet dropped into the adult male’s vocal register. Page boys are traditionally played by and written for contraltos and   

Senior Recital: Christina Infusino, soprano

https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1611&amp;context=musicprograms

Senior Recital: Christina Infusino, soprano

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