LISTEN

Tenor Brian Giebler and pianist Steven McGhee have been friends and musical collaborators since meetings as students at the University of Michigan in 2010. Their debut solo album a lad's love was released on Bridge Records in 2020 to extraordinary acclaim. It garnered high praise from such publications as Gramophone, Opera News (Critics Choice), and San Francisco Classical Voice, debuted on the Billboard charts, and earned them a GRAMMY® Award nomination for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album (63rd Annual GRAMMY® Awards). The album features works composed primarily within a twenty-year time period at the beginning of the 20th century, all by male, English composers and poets including Gurney, Benjamin Britten, A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, and John Ireland. From this rich repertoire, we discovered John Ireland’s settings of Housman’s later poetry, including a solo piano “song” with a title taken from A Shropshire Lad, and Ian Venables’ recent setting of “Because I liked you better”. But a theme emerged that took us beyond Housman, and beyond Gurney’s experiences during the Great War, and allowed us to connect more deeply to these pieces. From Quilter’s pleading setting of Shelley to Britten’s settings of W.H. Auden which are bolder, more self-assured statements of desire, we found an array of songs that, to our minds, tell stories of repressed or unrequited love with such variety, and yet such consistent emotional intensity, that they fit together beautifully. All the works on this program are, therefore, unified by the depth of feeling expressed by the lover, not by the gender of the object of his affection, which is conspicuously not specified in any of the texts.