Cairan Ryan and Nathan Wyatt headed to Tanglewood

Cairan Ryan and Nathan Wyatt

Nathan Wyatt and Cairan Ryan, two talented young artists who were recently featured on this site have been accepted into the 2014 Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Arts Program.

They will work with three legendary singers, Phyllis Curtin, Dawn Upshaw and Stephanie Blythe, as well as other coaches. During their residency they will hone their skills in art song, contemporary music, chamber music, and orchestral projects under the instruction of resident and visiting faculty artists.

This season, they will participate in a performance of Bernstein's Candide with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the Koussevitsky Music Shed, as well as performances with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, which will perform Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and other works.

Cairan Ryan was born in Lier, Belgium and emigrated to Calgary, Alberta. He is currently in his second year as a young artist at the Atelier Lyrique de L'Opéra de Montréal. Ryan makes his French debut on May 10 at Choregies d'Orange in a free concert of arias and duets with soprano Marlene Assayag, mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender and tenor Enguerrand De Hys.

In March, Wyatt performed the world premiere of Nico Muhly's work for baritone and orchestra, Pleasure Ground, with the Cincinnati Symphony as part of the MusicNOW Festival. In May, he sings the role of the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro with the American Dream Theater.

Barihunk Nathan Wyatt to premiere Nico Muhly piece

Nathan Wyatt

Barihunk Nathan Wyatt will premiere Nico Muhly's Pleasure Ground tonight as part of the  MusicNOW Festival with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Pleasure Ground depicts the life of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. Tickets are available online.

According to the composer:

"The title Pleasure Ground is a musical joke, a ground being a  recurring bass line that gives structure and melodic content at the same time. I use several grounds in this piece, but the third movement is particularly devoted to one cycle of 13 chords. At first, the ground is hidden inside a chorale-like texture of strings, over which violent brass and percussion snarl and fight. As the baritone sings about nature having overrun his designs, some small ensembles of instruments echo the voice: a bass trombone, sometimes, and others, a little gamelan of harp, bells and winds.

On the text “I have done a great deal of work in my life...” we first hear the ground bass in its proper position: at the bottom of the orchestra. It goes through two cycles, and suddenly transforms into the material from the very opening of the first movement, but here transformed from youthful optimism into something melancholic and halting. The piece ends with a delicate, drone-like texture under the words, “If man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees?” This text slowly unfurls over a chordal drone, illuminated from within by slowly shifting woodwinds and from without by celeste, glockenspiel and harp. The idea here is an ideal garden: designed but not fussed-with, communal, and fragilely eternal."

Nathan Wyatt as Bobby Kennedy in new opera

Nathan Wyatt as Bobby Kennedy and Caitlin Vincent as Jackie Kennedy (Photo: Britt Olsen-Ecker)

Nathan Wyatt is new to this site and we discovered him singing the role of Robert Kennedy in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield's Camelot Requiem. The North Carolina native has been involved with a number of world premieres lately including, Jake Heggie’s “Epilogue: Under the Blessing of your Psyche Wings,” as part of the Opera America Songbook, and William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863,” a commission by SongFest.

Camelot Requiem was commissioned by Baltimore’s Figaro Project in honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The opera tells the story of Jackie Kennedy and the small group who surrounded her immediately after the President’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Caitlin Vincent's libretto is drawn from the written history of the event, as well as the traditional requiem mass.

Nathan Wyatt sings William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863”

North Carolina native Nathan Wyatt is a recent graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. He was awarded a Tanglewood Music Festival Fellowship for the summer of 2013. In September, Wyatt was one of two invited soloists, along with soprano Elizabeth Futral, to perform new works in the official opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Opera America National Opera Center in New York.

Nathan Wyatt

He received first place honors in the Maryland/DC chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and was a finalist in the Sylvia Green Competition in 2010.  Recent opera roles include Alexander Kerensky in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield’s Strong like Bull, Le Directeur and Le Gendarme in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro, Lescaut in Manon, Guglielmo in Cosi fan tutte, and The Forester in The Adventures of Sharp-Ears the Vixen.  

In the fall of 2011, Mr. Wyatt made is Carnegie Hall debut under the direction of Marin Alsop in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s production of Arthur Honneger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher.