Forty-Four Ambitions for Soprano and Piano
Forty-Four Ambitions for Soprano and Piano is complete setting of Lola Haskins’ poetry collection, Forty-Four Ambitions for Piano, composed by Paul Richards between 2004-2011 in close consultation with the poet. The texts are eclectic and far ranging, by turns tragic and playful, earthy and whimsical, and insightful in surprising and delightful ways, and the music explores an extensive range of approaches, techniques, and ambiences within one collection.
In a 2019 recording on the Meyer Media label, soprano Caroline Worra and pianist Brian Garman bring these works to life with exquisite artistry and sensitivity in a celebration of music, music making, and the transformative power of art.
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Purchase
Audio for individual songs, or the complete collection is available here
CD from Meyer Media, coming soon!
Collaborators
Born in New York City in 1969 to a musical family, composer Paul Richards has been engaged with music since childhood, including forays into various popular styles, the Western canon, and Jewish sacred and secular music through his father, a cantor. All of these experiences inform his creative activities, which have included numerous orchestral, vocal, chamber, and theatrical works. Hailed in the press as a composer with "a strong, pure melodic gift, an ear for color, and an appreciation for contrast and variety," and praised for his "fresh approach to movement and beautiful orchestral coloration," his works have been heard in performance throughout the country and internationally on six continents.
He has been recognized in numerous competitions, including the 2017 Flute New Music Consortium Competition Competition, the 2014 Columbia Summer Winds Outdoor Composition Competition, the 2009 St. Mary's University/Kaplan Foundation Composition Competition, the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra's Fresh Ink 2002 Florida Composers' Competition, the International Section of the 2000 New Music for Sligo/IMRO Composition Award, and the 2001 and 2004 Truman State University/M.A.C.R.O. Composition Competitions. Other honors and awards include Special Distinction in the ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize, Finalist in the 2006 American Composers Orchestra Whitaker Reading Sessions, Finalist in the Atlanta Chamber Players 2009 Rapido! Composition Competition, Second Prize in the International Horn Society Composition Competition in 2001, First Place in the 1999 Voices of Change Composers Competition, two First Place prizes in the Guild of Temple Musicians Young Composers Award (1994-95, 1995-96) and many others.
Witch Doctor, a CD of Richards' wind ensemble music, was released in 2013 on the Mark Custom label. Fables, Forms, and Fears, a CD of Richards' chamber music, was released by Meyer Media in 2007. Music by Paul Richards is also recorded on the Centaur, MMC, Capstone, Spitfire, Summit, Raven, and Pavane labels. His works are published by Carl Fischer Music, the International Horn Society Press, TrevCo Music, Jeanné, Inc., and Margalit Music. Currently Research Foundation Professor of Music and head of composition and theory at the University of Florida, where he has been on the faculty since 1999, he served as Visiting Professor at Florida State University in 2016, and previously taught at Baylor University. Richards earned the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition at the University of Texas at Austin, and Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in Theory and Composition at the University of Arizona.
Please visit paulrichardsmusic.com for more information.
Lola Haskins’ poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Books, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Georgia Review, Southern Review and elsewhere. They have also been included in Billy Collins’ 180 project and featured by Ted Kooser, Garrison Keillor, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her most recent of 14 collections is How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016). A fifteenth, Asylum, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her prose works include an illustrated book of fables about women, a poetry advice book, and a collection of historical essays/true stories from fifteen Florida cemeteries.
Among Ms. Haskins’ awards for poetry are the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, four Florida state arts fellowships, one of four prizes for environmental writing from Florida’s Eden (an association of mostly visual artists), and the Emily Dickinson prize from the Poetry Society of America. She currently serves as Honorary Chancellor of the Florida State Poets Association.
Ms. Haskins graduated from Stanford (too many years ago) summa cum laude. Her employment history includes working as a waitress in a taverna in Athens, Greece; singing folk and jazz in nightclubs in Mexico, the Caribbean, and England; doing social science researcher for Stanford Research Institute; writing psychology curriculum for a dental school; teaching Computer Science at UF for 28 years (in the course of which which students twice voted her teacher of the year); and serving for 15 on the faculty of Rainier Writer’s Workshop, a low-res MFA program in Tacoma WA.
She adores collaboration, and has worked with visual artists, dancers, actors, and and composers. Among her favorite experiences are playing the speaking Mata Hari (a role she wrote) in a full length ballet of that title; having a joint Japanese-themed exhibit with photographer Diane Farris; singing and reciting in four multi-media performances at the Hippodrome (a professional theater in Gainesville, Florida); being lucky enough to broadcast poetry and commentaries – sometimes with music—on BBC and NPR; and, last but not least, recording a CD of poems from her collection The Grace to Leave, with cellist Ben Noyes. For the last 10 years she has been joyfully studying North Indian classical singing with Swathi Mahalaxshmi. She would love you to visit her at lolahaskins.com
Caroline Worra has been hailed by Opera News as “one of the finest singing actresses around.” She has sung over 75 different operatic roles including more than 20 World, American, and Regional Premieres. She was internationally acclaimed for her performances of Jenny in The Mines of Sulphur, Grammy nominated CD for Best Opera Recording, and as the title role for The Greater Good; Passion of Boule de Suif, Opera News and New York Times pick for one of the top classical CDs of the year. Her third full opera recording, Glory Denied, was released by Albany Records and was a Washington Post and Opera News pick for one of the top CDs of the year. Her fourth full opera CD, Amleto by Franco Faccio, was recorded live by Naxos and was an Opera News pick for one of the ten best opera recordings of the year. For Caroline's portrayal of Regina Geltrude, she was reviewed (2017) by Voix des Arts as “singing with emotional directness and white hot charisma” and “exerting a prodigious histrionic presence even in the context of an audio recording.”
Ms. Worra has worked at over 30 opera companies across the United States including The Metropolitan Opera, The Lyric Opera of Chicago, Boston Lyric Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Dallas Opera, Long Beach Opera, Opera Santa Barbara, Madison Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera, Opera Memphis, Fargo-Moorhead Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, Urban Arias, American Lyric Theatre, American Opera Projects, Tanglewood, Opera Saratoga, Berkshire Opera Festival, The Princeton Festival, and six seasons at both Glimmerglass Opera and New York City Opera. Caroline performed on two U.S. National Tours with San Francisco’s Merola/Western Opera Theatre singing Violetta in LaTraviata and Rosalinda in DieFledermaus. She gave a debut recital at Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall) and performed on the main stage of Carnegie Hall as the soprano soloist in Beethoven’s Mass in C, Britten’s Spring Symphony, Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Orff’s Carmina Burana. She recently performed as the soprano soloist in Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the LaCrosse Symphony. Overseas she has performed as Anne True Love in The Rake’s Progress at Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and Jenny in The Mines of Sulphur at The Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland (winner of The 2009 Best Opera of Ireland Award). She just returned from Brasil where she performed Violetta in LaTraviata with ECAI in Brasilia.
Caroline is a recipient of the Shoshana Foundation/Richard F. Gold Career Grant. She grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from Onalaska High School where she also received the 2015 Wall of Excellence Award. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Piano and Vocal Performance from Luther College where she received the Distinguished Service Award in 2016. She has a Master of Music Degree in Vocal Performance from The University of Missouri in Columbia where she received a 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award from the College of Arts and Science. Caroline also has a Doctor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Indiana University with minors in Music Education and Choral Conducting.
photo: Andrew Ousley
Maestro Brian Garman is the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Berkshire Opera Festival. After over a year spent auditioning and establishing the Berkshire Opera Festival Orchestra and Chorus, he conducted BOF’s inaugural production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in summer 2016, last summer’s production of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and returned to the podium for this summer’s production of Verdi’s Rigoletto. Maestro Garman also joined the Crested Butte Music Festival in summer 2018 as the new Music Director of Opera, leading Verdi’s Falstaff. He opened Seattle Opera’s 2009-10 season conducting Verdi’s La Traviata, and in the previous fall was named the inaugural Music Director of the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, a position established for him that he held for five years. His skills as an orchestra builder assisted him in creating the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program Orchestra – a process that resulted in giving Seattle Opera the only full-season training program in the country with its own permanent professional orchestra. He most recently led the members of that program in a Verdi bicentennial concert and productions of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. One season prior, he was on the podium for a production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in March, while April saw him in Palm Springs leading a gala parks concert. He was previously on the conducting roster at New York City Opera, and made his debut with that company at the VOX Showcase in May 2006, an engagement he repeated the following year. He returned to the podium for City Opera’s production of Bizet’s Carmen in October and November 2007. In the summer of 2008, he led a highly-successful run of Verdi’s Un Giorno di Regno at the Wolf Trap Opera Company, prompting The Wall Street Journal critic Greg Sandow to write that Maestro Garman was “one of the best bel canto conductors I've ever heard.” His acclaimed debut at Wolf Trap occurred the preceding summer leading Chabrier’s L’Étoile. His relationship with the Seattle Opera began in March 2008 when he conducted the Young Artists Program double-bill of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.
Maestro Garman was previously the Resident Conductor and Chorus Master at Pittsburgh Opera for ten years. While so engaged, he led Pittsburgh’s productions of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Verdi’s Rigoletto, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Die Zauberflöte, and Massenet’s Werther, among others, to unanimous praise. Additionally, as Music Director of the Pittsburgh Opera Center, he was at the helm for several productions with that company, including Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, Puccini’s La Rondine, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Verdi’s Il Corsaro, and J. Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. Also a senior member of the music staff of The Santa Fe Opera for six years, he served as associate conductor for numerous productions, and assisted in the musical preparation of more than 25 different operas, including two world premieres.
As a pianist and coach, Maestro Garman is sought after by numerous singers of renown, and has been called upon frequently to give recitals and master classes around the United States and Europe. He received a Master of Music degree in Vocal Coaching and Accompanying from the legendary John Wustman, and recently completed a guest appointment as the Music Director of the opera program at Carnegie Mellon University, after previous engagements at Mannes College The New School for Music, the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, and Duquesne University.
Project History, from Paul Richards
Project overview
When I first read through Lola Haskins’ Forty-four Ambitions for Piano in the early 2000’s, simply for the pleasurable experience of encountering her art on its own terms, I distinctly remember finishing the final poem and knowing that I would one day set the entire book to music. With the blessing of the poet, and in constant consultation with her, I began setting the texts in 2004, chipping away in the space between other endeavors, and finally completing the project in 2011. Forty-Four Ambitions for Soprano and Piano is a book of songs in seven “sets”, a kind of cycle-of-song-cycles.
Poems and poet
Haskins’s work was inspired by her experience of undertaking serious music study in mid-life, and each poem takes an aspect of the discipline as a launching pad for meditations about art and desire, striving and searching, and more. An example:
Pull Down / Release
Here the climb really ends. Pull down
on the black note,
release on the white. You’re already
there, the wind sheens
around you, soon you will begin again.
You are an old woman, light
in her bones. You are the mother who
tells her daughter, go,
and feels her own body ebb, the way sand
vanishes down a hundred tiny holes
when the tide recedes. Week after awkward
week you fail. And why?
Because you still believe you can hold on.
Listen to your hands.
They are not as young as you.
They know.
Eclectic and far-ranging, by turns tragic and playful, earthy and whimsical, and insightful in surprising and delightful ways, the poems provided me an opportunity to explore an extensive range of approaches, techniques, and ambiences within one collection – a kind of “radical inclusivity” that has informed much of my creative work of late.
Unique in my experience, and rare, I think, in the tradition of text setting, was my easy access to the poet and her precise vision of how her words might be presented. After completing preliminary settings of some of the texts, I would sing and play through the work for Lola and get her feedback. Having had significant musical training, she was able to comment on specific musical matters as well as broader issues of interpretation, meaning, and emphasis. This consultation proved invaluable, helping steer my inclinations toward music that aims to complement and counterpoint the words without obscuring the poet’s original intent. Nothing hit the stage without her blessing. Though the texts were carved in stone before I got to them, and have remained unaltered, this was still very much a collaborative and interdisciplinary venture, and a real education for me in the art of poetry and the potential relationships of text and music.
Engagement with history
A significant component of Haskins’ confrontation of music in this text involves an engagement with repertoire and history. Debussy, Mozart, Grieg, and more earn specific mention, individual works of Satie, Shostakovich, and Webern serve as inspiration for poems, and each of the seven sections of the book is preceded in print by a four-measure incipit from the Sarabande from Bach’s first Partita. All of this provided an irresistible invitation for me to engage in my own dialogue with the past, and I do so in several different ways. Brief quotation and style mimicry is part of the technique in several settings, and in the works inspired by specific compositions, I have presented those sources with Haskins’ text layered on top. On a macro level, the Bach Sarabande serves as a tonal framework that guides the entire collection, with each set reflecting the four-measure incipit that precedes it in some way. The end result is that the entire book functions as a kind of explosion of Bach’s brief original into a large work guided by that same architecture and trajectory. In the recording, the Bach phrases are inserted to introduce each set of songs. The final song in the collection (“The Pianist Who Keeps a Loaded Gun on Her Piano When She Practices”) is set as new music added above Bach’s original, serving as culmination and recapitulation of the complete collection.