Alyson Cambridge at the Kennedy Center

Charles T. Downey, Soprano Travels Adventurous Road During D.C. Recital
Classical Voice North America, January 23

W. Bolcom, From the Diary of Sally Hemings, A. Cambridge, L. Brown (White Pine Music, 2010)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Soprano Alyson Cambridge is testing the boundaries of classical music. The Washington-born singer’s breakthrough role at Washington National Opera was in the musical Show Boat, and her second recording, combining jazz, crossover, and pop music, was released on Naxos’ new Suite 28 Records label. Her recital on Jan. 20 in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, presented by Washington Performing Arts under the title “In Her Voice,” brought together three new song cycles by American composers, two of them world premieres.

The concert opened with the most substantial work, William Bolcom’s From the Diary of Sally Hemings, which Cambridge recorded for a disc released in 2010. Bolcom used a literary text by playwright Sandra Seaton — eighteen entries in an imagined diary as it might have been written by Hemings, the slave of American president Thomas Jefferson...

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Alyson Cambridge (soprano)
William Bolcom, From the Diary of Sally Hemings
Music by Jeffrey Mumford, Adam Schoenberg
Washington Performing Arts
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

SEE ALSO:
Noah Mlotek, Jeffrey Mumford Portrait at the National Gallery (Ionarts, February 12, 2013)

Barbara Jepson, New Music With a Tonal Twist (Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2010)