Booking available HERE from 10am Monday 30th June
Opera Collective Ireland present: Songs of Travel, Vaughn Williams/The Andrée Expedition – Argento.
Two of Ireland’s leading performers, Benjamin Russell, baritone and Gary Beecher, piano will interpret Argento’s emotionally charged song cycle which uses excerpts from Andrée’s journals and letters found in 1930, 33 years after the men’s disappearance along with excerpts from Songs of Travel by Ralph Vaughn Williams.
Songs of Travel (excerpts) – Ralph Vaughan Williams
Songs for baritone and piano, composed 1901-1904
The Andrée Expedition – Dominick Argento
Thirteen Songs for baritone and piano, composed in 1982.
Uniquely English in style, the songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams embed us firmly in the warm English countryside. The pairing of Vaughan Williams’ lush and evocative music with the colorful prose of Robert Louis Stevenson brings to life these stories of a weary wanderer in search of something meaningful.
In contrast, the icy North Pole is the scene of The Andrée Expedition which concerns an ultimately tragic balloon expedition by three Swedish men led by Salomon Andrée in 1897. Three months after they set off for the Pole on July 11th their records stopped and thirty-three years later their bodies were discovered together with preserved notebooks and diaries.
operacollectiveireland.com
