The superb duo of soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman will perform my Three Folk Hymns at UC San Diego on Wednesday, March 15, at 7 pm. The program also includes music by Kurtág, Schumann, and Zemlinsky.

Three Folk Hymns includes pieces based on “What Wondrous Love is This?”, “Be Thou My Vision”, and “How Can I Keep From Singing?”. (Read this post written at the time of the premiere by Suzanne Rigden.) You might say it is a sequel to my 1989 set of Three Sacred Songs, works based on ancient chant melodies, with Latin texts. “How Can I…” existed as an individual song for some time; later I experimented with including it in a larger set of five songs in both Latin and English, but I think I have now settled on putting just these three songs together as a set (though they may be performed individually).

I treasure Susan as a long-time advocate for my music, evidenced by her fantastic work on my Bridge cd Sacred Songs, with the 21st Century Consort conducted by Christopher Kendall. Here are a few samples from that album:

Scores for the Three Folk Hymns are available directly from me: jamesprimosch at gmail dot com

(Narucki & Berman photo: Richard Bowditch)