The Village Trip -- Cygnus with soprano Leah Brzyski present new work by Ricardo Zohn Muldoon

The Village Trip presents
ensemble Cygnus, with soprano Leah Brzyski

The Village Trip
presents

ensemble Cygnus, with soprano Leah Brzyski
in the premiere of Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s

Gypsum

settings of poems by Deidre Huckaby

Monday, September 12, 2022, at 7:30PM
at
St. John’s in the Village
218 West 11th Street
New York, NY 10014

Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon was born in Guadalajara, México, in 1962. Literature inspires many of his compositions, such as Gypsum, on texts by Deidre Huckabay, the extended song cycle Songtree, on poetry by Raúl Aceves and William Shakespeare, the miniature opera NiñoPolilla, on a libretto by Juan Trigos senior, and the scenic cantata Comala, based on the novel Pedro Páramo, by the great Mexican author Juan Rulfo. Comala was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. Ricardo’s compositional voice is shaped through steady collaborations with artists like Leah Brzyski. He is currently Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music.

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Mr Zohn-Muldoon writes–

I composed Gypsum for the Cygnus Ensemble and soprano Leah Brzyski, thanks to a commission from The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress. The work is a setting of texts by Deidre Huckabay that reflect on their childhood teddy bear “Scoliosis”.

Deidre described the process of writing these texts as unfolding “in a very freeform way, keeping something like a journal on the experience of spending time driving, thinking about Scoliosis, thinking about death, reading about it, dreaming, living, anything.” Further, Deidre writes that the texts “fall into a few categories:

•Material: meditations on the actual stuff of Scoliosis, maybe their character (Scoliosis’s pronoun is they/them), the stuff of the trip and the landscape
•Dialogues: conversations between me and Scoliosis, me and no one
•Rituals: instructions for writing, reports on what I actually did to prepare to write”

Deidre’s texts elicited a playful attitude in my musical imagination and the desire to give space to a wide variety of inter-related musical ideas and associations that seemed whimsically pertinent. These include references to objects I admired as a child (such as my grandfather’s cuckoo clock), quoting from a guitar work I composed in my teens, and evoking fleeting connections to two famous musical works that I loved in childhood, one which my mother used to play at the piano, and the other which my sisters danced to in their ballet lessons.

Texts by Deidre Huckabay –>

(numbered in their order of appearance in the musical setting)

1. what do you hold

what do you hold?
snow

what do you love?
snow

snow where are you from? snow

where will you go when you are gone? snow

2. gypsum

grass grass cotton limestone grass

tar
scrub yucca gypsum
fir — FUR grass

snow

4. stay stay stay

everything points to starting with everything go somewhere and stay

go and stay stay stay

3. i love you

i love you

i love you

i love you

–

–

–

ii

5. snow

it is snow? or cotton?

sn– *

~

,-` *

6. cotton

remember
you grew up
surrounded by cotton fields

you in a bullseye surrounded by rings of cotton
blown dry
bone dry

starting tomorrow start with cotton
start with coffee drink 2 cups of coffee before you begin

then cotton
white like snow white like gypsum white like you

8. open your mouth

starting tomorrow
just open your mouth
as if you are going to drink coffee but
say some words

put on boots without lacing them

7. closet

i am afraid of forgetting you
until i remember i am already forgetting you and have been for years
all the years i went on living
with you on the top shelf in the closet

-

*

.

–o

iii

9. so so so so

so soft so so tender so so kind

so
so
oh
oso scoleoso scoleosito

Rising coloratura soprano Leah Brzyski is quickly establishing herself as a noteworthy performer throughout the United States. This past season, she made her Santa Fe Opera debut premiering the role of Agave in Adamo and Corigliano’s opera Lord of Cries and covering the role of Tytania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). She then joined Minnesota Opera’s Resident Artist Program for a second season to sing the roles of Frasquita in Carmen and Jeannette in The Anonymous Lover attracting praise for her ability to “soar vocally and steal scenes” (StarTribune).

Recent roles include Miss Wordsworth (Albert Herring) with Minnesota Opera and Princeton Festival, Norina (Don Pasquale) with Bel Cantanti Opera, Cendrillon (Cendrillon) with Opera Ithaca, and Le Rossignol (Le Rossignol) with Yale Opera. Ms. Brzyski was the 1st place winner of the 2022 Schubert Club Competition, the 2020 Grand Junction Symphony Competition, the 2020 Dorothy-Lincoln Smith Competition, and a District Winner of the Metropolitan National Council Auditions (2020).

Upcoming performances include the roles of Zerlina (Don Giovanni) with Minnesota Opera, Agave (Lord of Cries) with Odyssey Opera, and her international debut performance at the Festival Internacional Callejón del Ruido.