April Fredrick
soprano
About
April trained at Northwestern College in St Paul, MN (now the University of Northwestern St Paul) and later at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where, as a perennial bookworm and voraciously curious musician, she learned as much as she could about everything on offer, from historical performance (where she learned to tell a pas de bourée from a galliard and honed her use of light and shade in sound) to contemporary music and the joys of extended technique and site-specific performance to the riches of the British choral tradition (have YOU ever gotten goosebumps from a well-tuned chord or had to get your note in a 12-tone fugue from a tuning fork in the ear?) to opera and character-building (from high-F-singing Controllers to hoop-skirted Countesses to jealousy-ridden, mad Medeas) to improvisation over a mischievous grin.
Her special love, however, has always been song, an outgrowth of her passion for words. As a poet herself, she adores finding every nuance of colour and emotion--a whole world of experience, like a symphony in a few minutes--packed into the small space that art song occupies: that magic mingling of a poet's world and eyes with a composer's mind and musical voice, a chain that she and her pianist partner in crime join, and into which the audience is then drawn too. It is a dance, an adventure, a challenge, a journey into the ‘land of the soul’. As Goethe’s Mignon asks Wilhelm Meister, looking straight at him, ‘You know it—yes?’
Song started in living rooms, around excited conversations about art, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, religion, economics, and culture--the very lifeblood of society. She thinks it never should have left and that the music is as fresh and exhilarating as it ever was, so she is delighted to share that excitement and cross-pollinating curiosity with new GroupMuse audiences in close quarters.
Music
I have a vast repertoire of songs from Renaissance to Contemporary from Purcell and Schubert to Berg and Weir. Name the theme and I can enflesh it. A small selection of composers whose works I can feature:
Caccini Monteverdi Purcell Dowland Bach Buxtehude Handel Telemann Vivaldi Scarlatti Strozzi Arne Haydn Mozart Beethoven Schubert Mendelssohn-Hensel Schumann (Robert and Clara) von Arnim von Decker Brahms Wolf Berg Schoenberg Strauss Korngold Liszt Bellini Bizet Donizetti Verdi Dvorak Debussy Charpentier Chabrier Viadot Boulanger (Lili and Nadia) Ravel De Falla Rodrigo Villa-Lobos Clarke Elgar Parry Bridge Gurney Howells Butterworth Vaughan Williams Ireland Britten Tippett Rimsky-Korsakov Mussorgsky Gliere Cui Prokofiev Shostakovich Ives Copland Barber Beach Menotti Dougherty Bernstein Alden-Carpenter Hoiby Argento Hegge Corigliano Dring Roe Maxwell-Davies Weir