One of the greatest living baritones, a leading recitalist.

—San Jose Mercury News

Program

Song of America

FRANCIS HOPKINSON: My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free (Thomas Parnell)
STEPHEN C. FOSTER: Open Thy Lattice, Love
AARON COPLAND: The Dodger, The Boatman's Dance
CHARLES IVES: Circus Band, In Flanders Fields (Col. John McRae), Charlie Rutlage (trad. collected by John Avery Lomax)
EDWARD MACDOWELL: The Sea (W.D. Howells after Goethe)
CHARLES NAGINSKI: Look Down Fair Moon (Walt Whitman)
ARTHUR FARWELL: Song of the Deathless Voice (Omaha Indian)
MICHAEL DAUGHERTY: Letter to Mrs. Bixby (Abraham Lincoln)
ELINOR REMICK WARREN: God Be In My Heart
VIRGIL THOMSON: Tiger Tiger (William Blake)
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: To What You Said (Walt Whitman)
RICHARD DANIELPOUR: Shiloh (Herman Melville)
MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS: At Ship's Helm (Walt Whitman)
JOHN CORIGLIANO: One Sweet Morning (Yip Harburg)
PAUL BOWLES: Blue Mountain Ballads (Tennesee Williams)
STEPHEN WHITE (arr): Shenandoah (trad.)

ENCORE:
STEPHEN FOSTER: Beautiful Dreamer


FREE PUBLIC EVENT:
Song of America—A Diary
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
50 Oak St (between Franklin & Van Ness Ave)
Tuesday, September 29, 7pm

Presentation by Thomas Hampson. Q&A session will follow with Library of Congress curators.

About This Performance

Thomas Hampson, the “ambassador of American song,” joins forces with the Library of Congress to create Song of America. Celebrating the history of America's creativity, this collaboration features repertoire spanning from 1700 until today, including psalm settings and hymns, folksongs, war songs, African-American spirituals and other works by our nation's great composers.

Click to view Thomas Hampson's CD Wondrous Free: Song of America II - just released on itunes!

Links/Downloads

*To view the program notes, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader (available as a free download from Adobe).

Artist Biography

Thomas Hampson is a singer, actor, scholar, teacher, passionate golf player, avid collector of books and a committed advocate of new technologies.

Born in Elkhart, Indiana, he was raised in Spokane, Washington, and educated at Eastern Washington University, Cheney, and Fort Wright College, Spokane. He began his professional career as a voice student of Sr. Marietta Coyle, and at the age of 19 first appeared in an opera production – portraying a very youthful father of the two title characters in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. During the following years Thomas Hampson studied with Martial Singher, Horst Günter and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. In 1980 he came to Europe and had his first permanent engagement at Düsseldorf’s Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Four years later he joined the roster of the Zurich Opera where he collaborated frequently with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Nikolaus Harnoncourt and where he has since appeared every season.

Thomas Hampson’s encounter with Leonard Bernstein, whom he met a few years before his death, had an equally strong impact on his life and career and led the way to his becoming one of today’s leading interpreters of the music of Gustav Mahler. His passion for the lied repertoire, however, is not restricted to the German Romantics from Schubert to Wolf and Richard Strauss – he has devoted himself especially to composers of his native country and has initiated and been involved in a number of concert series and recordings as well as TV and multimedia projects. Chief among these has been a 12-city US recital tour in the 2005–06 season, with pianists Wolfram Rieger and Craig Rutenberg, entitled Song of America and presented in collaboration with the Library of Congress. The concerts were dedicated entirely to American art song repertoire, and the tour will continue in 2008.

Song and singing to Thomas Hampson are the “diary of our existence” and therefore of the greatest significance for intercultural dialogue and understanding. To provide a forum for this kind of exchange, he in 2003 established the HAMPSONG Foundation. Its internet platform, www.hampsong.org, not only serves as an archive of his own activities as a musician and scholar but also makes available the results of these activities – in the form of essays, images, audio and video material – to a larger audience.

If as a lied singer Thomas Hampson has set new standards, his musical versatility has allowed him to be equally successful in opera, operetta, oratorio and musical theater. His repertoire includes the title roles of Don Giovanni, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Guillaume Tell, Macbeth, Simon Boccanegra, Eugene Onegin, Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, Massenet’s Werther (in the baritone version), Busoni’s Doktor Faust, Szymanowski’s King Roger, Britten’s Billy Budd, Hans Werner Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg, and Friedrich Cerha’s opera Der Riese vom Steinfeld which had its world premiere in Vienna in 2002. In addition, Thomas Hampson has sung the Count in Le nozze di Figaro, Giorgio Germont, Renato, Marquis of Posa, Wolfram, Amfortas, Mandryka, Oreste in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, and Athanael in Massenet’s Thais. In these and various other roles he has made guest appearances at the world’s major opera houses while being particularly associated with, aside from the Zurich Opera, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Opéra National de Paris, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and the Vienna State Opera.

Thomas Hampson’s numerous recordings include most of his opera roles and cover a broad stylistic range, from Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine and cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, which he recorded at the beginning of his career with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, to Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorios Paulus and Elijah as well as works by Walton, Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius, Maurice Duruflé and American composer Elinor Remick Warren, to operettas by Franz Lehár and Johann Strauss, to musical theater works by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein. Most of these recordings have won distinguished prizes, among them the Grammy and the Gramophone Award, the Grand Prix du Disque, the Edison Prize, and the Echo Klassik.

Thomas Hampson has been awarded several honorary doctorates, honorary membership in the Royal Academy of Music, the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and the Austrian Honorary Medal (Ehrenkreuz) for Science and Art.

 

Wolfram Rieger received his first piano lessons from his parents and later from Konrad Pfeiffer in Regensburg.  He soon developed a deep affection for Lied interpretation and therefore continued his studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich with the famous Lied pianists Prof. Dr. Erik Werba and Prof. Helmut Deutsch.  After earning diploma with distinction, he attended several masterclasses with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Even during his studies he began teaching at Munich's Hochschule für Musik until in 1991 he started his own Lieder class for singers and pianists  In 1998 he became Professor of a Lied class at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler." Wolfram Rieger regularly holds masterclasses in Europe and Japan.

Wolfram Rieger is a regular guest artist at many  important music centres and festivals throughout the world, including the Schubertiade Feldkirch, Schubertiada a Vilabertran, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Châtelet, London's Wigmore Hall, New York's Carnegie Hall, the Vienna Musikverein and Konzerthaus, Salzburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Munich Festivals, Konzerthaus Berlin and Kölner Philharmonie. He appears both as recital accompanist and chamber musician with such renowned artists as Brigitte Fassbaender, Barbara Bonney, Juliane Banse,Michelle Breedt, Thomas Hampson, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Olaf Bär, Matthias Goerne, Christoph Prégardien, Thomas Quasthoff, Peter Schreier, Michael Schade, The Cherubini Quartet, The Vogler Quartet , The Petersen Quartet among many others.

A prolific recording artist, Mr. Rieger  is well-represented on numerous CDs, many of which received various awards.

Awards and distinctions include the honorary medal of the Associació Franz Schubert de Barcelona.