Duncan Rock to be featured at Petworth Festival in WW I program

Duncan Rock

Australian barihunk Duncan Rock will be featured at this year's Petworth Festival in the U.K., performing music related to WWI.  The centerpiece of the concert will be George Butterworth's setting of A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad, which comprise eleven settings from the original sixty-three poems. The concert also includes music by Gerald Finzi and Ned Rorem. Tickets are available online.

Butterworth was killed in the Battle of the Somme and was posthumously awarded the Military Cross. His brigade commander, Brigadier General Page Croft, only learned after Butterworth's death that he was one of England's most promising young composers. Butterworth's body was never recovered and his name appears on the Thiepval Memorial, honoring the 72,246 British and South African soldiers missing in action during WWI.

John Brancy sings Butterworth's "The lads in their hundreds":

Petworth was also impacted by war, having suffered a horrible tragedy in World War II a generation later.  On September 29, 1942, a lone German Heinkel 111, approaching from the south over Hoes Farm, aimed three bombs at Petworth House, the stately 17th century home of Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset. The bombs missed the house, but one bounced off a tree and landed on the Petworth Boys' School killing 28 boys, the headmaster and an assistant teacher.

American barihunk John Brancy also has toured with a popular program of WWI songs with pianist Peter Dugan. The recital. "A Silent Night: A WWI Memorial in Song," is also available on CD.

John Brancy live stream of WWI centennial commemoration

John Brancy and Peter Dugan

On April 6th, barihunk John Brancy and accompanist Peter Dugan will perform selections from their upcoming album at In Sacrifice For Liberty and Peace at the centennial commemoration of the U.S. entry into World War I.

The event is hosted by the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City and will be live streamed on C-SPAN on Thursday, April 6th at 10 AM EST/7 AM PST. The Defense Media Agency will also broadcast the ceremony live to the U.S armed forces and Defense Department Schools internationally.

Brancy will also perform the National Anthem with French and US Aircraft flying overhead. The event also features Kevin Costner, R&B recording artists Billy Cliff and Lisa Fischer and Kansas City Lyric Opera artist Samantha Gossard.

You can click HERE to watch the event live. 

Pianist Peter Dugan and barihunk John Brancy launch Indiegogo campaing

Pianist Peter Dugan with barihunk John Brancy (l-r)

Barihunk John Brancy and pianist Peter Dugan have launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund a recording based on their amazing live show A Silent Night: A WWI Centenary Tribute in Song, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2014. The took the show on tour to the University of Chicago, the Montreal Conservatory of Music in collaboration with Société d'art vocal, Opera Saratoga, the Joye at the Aiken Festival and St. John's College.

The two have been collaborative musical partners and friends since they met as students at the Juilliard School in 2007.

The program is a collection of classical and popular art songs written mostly by composers who lived through, fought, and died in the Great War. A Silent Night organizes these songs by the major countries involved in the war, beginning with British composers Gerald Finzi, George Butterworth, and Ivor Gurney, rarely heard lieder of German composer Carl Orff, songs by the great French composers Ravel, Poulenc, and Debussy, and the iconic American composer Charles Ives.

The recording will be available for sale on all online platforms including Amazon and iTunes, as well as on CD. Perks to support the campaign start as low as $5.00. You can support the campaign HERE.

Barihunk duo in Songs of WW I in Brooklyn

John Moore and Jarrett Ott

On November 6th the Brooklyn Art Song Society will present Britannica: In Memoriam: Songs of the Great War at The Old Stone House. Barihunks John Moore and Jarrett Ott will join tenor Dominic Armstrong and pianists Michael Brofman and Miori Sugiya. Tickets are available online. 

The concert focuses on works by British composers whose lives were impacted by World War I.  W. Dennis Browne and George Butterworth were killed in action, and their respective pieces represent the tragic loss of genius before their time.  Ivor Gurney wrote his powerful songs in a sanitarium receiving treatment for psychological trauma from his war experience.. Though Gerald Finzi was from the next generation, he set Thomas Hardy's Channel Firing, a famous meditation on the madness of war. 

Upcoming performances for Ott include the Opera Philadelphia Emerging Artist series on November 8th with fellow barihunk Andrew Bogard and hunkentenor Roy Hage. You can listen to Jarrett Ott sing Pierrot's Tanzlied HERE.

Upcoming performances for Moore include Count Almavivia in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro with the Seattle Opera opening in January 2016, Tadeusz in Weinberg's The Passenger with Florida Grand Opera and Adario in Rameau's Les Indes galantes at the Munich Opera Festival with fellow barihunk Tareq Nami.

MAKE SURE TO ORDER YOUR 2016 BARIHUNKS CALENDAR BEFORE THE HOLIDAY RUSH; 18 OF THE WORLD'S HOTTEST SINGER FROM 9 COUNTRIES.