Friday, June 23, 2023, 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Songs of the Earth
Mark Padmore with Sarah Deming and Ethan Iverson
poetry and lieder commenting on our relationship to nature.
Tenor Mark Padmore came of age singing in choirs oriented toward Renaissance and Baroque music, and as a soloist he has specialized in Baroque opera and choral music. His repertory, however, extends forward to Britten, Vaughan Williams, and contemporary choral music, and he has become one of Britain's most consistenly popular singers.
Padmore was born in London on March 8, 1961, but grew up in Canterbury. He studied clarinet and piano as a child, but jumped at the chance to enter King's College, Cambridge, as a Choral Scholar and to join the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. That led in turn to admission to Cambridge as a student. He graduated in 1982 and immediately set about establishing himself as a singer. He sang at one time or another with the top Renaissance vocal groups of the 1980s: the Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, and the Hilliard Ensemble. He has also performed with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Monteverdi Choir, Collegium Vocale, the English Baroque Soloists, and the instrumental ensemble Fretwork. In the field of choral music he is noted for his performances of Bach's major choral works, including those under Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. He has sung on top British operatic stages, performing music from Handel's Jephtha at the English National Opera, to Mozart's La clemenza di Tito under conductor René Jacobs in a Harmonia Mundi recording, to Harrison Birtwistle's The Corridor at the Aldeburgh Festival. He appeared as Peter Quint on BBC television in a production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw (a DVD of which won a Gramophone award for best operatic recording), and as a recitalist he has often performed the music of Britten, covering music written for the vocally similar Peter Pears. He is a frequent guest at London's Wigmore Hall, often performing challenging contemporary music by the likes of Birtwistle, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sally Beamish, and Huw Watkins. Padmore's recording catalogue is extensive and deep. In 1999 and 2000s he recorded Bach's Lutheran masses for Chandos, and he has continued to record for that label. In 2007 he made his debut on Harmonia Mundi with the Handel album As Steals the Morn, and he has recorded extensively for that label. In 2018 he recorded the Winterreise song cycle of Schubert, another composer he has favored, for Harmonia Mundi, accompanied by fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Sarah Deming is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. Her YA novel Gravity, forthcoming in November 2019 from Make Me a World/Random House, tells the story of a female boxer’s battles on the road to the Rio Games. Sarah began boxing after graduating from Brown University and was the 2001 New York City Golden Gloves and Empire State Games featherweight champion. She has covered hundreds of amateur and professional fights from ringside, including the Rio Olympics and the 2012 Women’s World Championships in China. She covered the London Olympics as part of the Emmy-winning NBC team and, as an HBO Boxing Insider, covered the first women’s bout broadcast on HBO Championship Boxing. She coaches and tutors youth boxers at NYC Cops and Kids, a free community gym in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Threepenny Review, Deadspin, and Penthouse Forum. She has won a Pushcart Prize, MacDowell Fellowship, and been noted in Best American Essays and Best American Sportswriting. Sarah has worked as a chef, yoga teacher, financial recruiter, ghostwriter, vodka peddler, dog walker, nanny, and SAT coach. Eight years ago, she donated a kidney to her mother Ruth, who is still going strong. That kidney’s name was Odysseus; the kidney she kept is called Mike Tyson. Sarah lives in Brooklyn with her husband Ethan Iverson and their collection of stuffed monsters.
Pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson was a founding member of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with Reid Anderson and David King. The New York Times called TBP “Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” During his 17-year tenure, TBP performed in venues as diverse as the Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, and Bonnaroo; collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group; and created a faithful arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction.
Since leaving TBP, Iverson has kept busy. 2017: Co-curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University and premiered the evening-length Pepperland with the Mark Morris Dance Group. 2018: premiered an original piano concerto with the American Composers Orchestra and released a duo album of new compositions with Mark Turner on ECM. 2019: Common Practice with Tom Harrell (ECM), standards tracked live at the Village Vanguard. 2021: Bud Powell in the 21st Century, a vigorous reconsideration of the bebop master, is featured on the March cover of DownBeat. 2022: The current release is Every Note is True on Blue Note records, an album of original work in trio with Larry Grenadier and Jack DeJohnette.
Iverson also has been in the critically-acclaimed Billy Hart quartet for well over a decade and occasionally performs with elder statesmen like Albert “Tootie” Heath or Ron Carter or collaborates with noted classical musicians like Miranda Cuckson and Mark Padmore. For almost 20 years, Iverson’s website Do the Math has been a repository of musician-to-musician interviews and analysis. Time Out New York selected Iverson as one of 25 essential New York jazz icons: “Perhaps NYC’s most thoughtful and passionate student of jazz tradition—the most admirable sort of artist-scholar.” Iverson has also published articles about music in the New Yorker, NPR, The Nation, and JazzTimes. Iverson resides in Park Slope with his wife Sarah Deming.
Billy Collins - As if to demonstrate an eclipse
Franz Schubert - Im Abendrot
Mary Oliver - Mysteries, Yes
Gustav Mahler - Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft
Kathleen Jamie - Perfect Day
Aaron Copland - Nature, the Gentlest Mother
Hanns Eisler - Sprinkling of Gardens
Robin Robertson - Keys to the Door
Gabriel Fauré - Prison
Philip Larkin - Going, going
Reynaldo Hahn - Chanson d’automne
Tansy Davies - Destroying Beauty
Seamus Heaney - Clearances
Benjamin Britten - The auld Aik
Charles Ives - The Cage
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Panther
Rebecca Clarke - The Tiger
D H Lawrence - The Snake
Sally Beamish - O Hoopoe
Wallace Stevens - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Charles Ives - Housatonic at Stockbridge
Franz Schubert - Die Mutter Erde
Hayden Carruth - Essay
Ralph Vaughan Williams - Nocturne
Mary Oliver - When Death Comes
Gustav Holst - Betelgeuse
Thomas Hardy - To Meet or Otherwise
Franz Schubert - Frühlingsglaube
