By Clare Byrne for CT Examiner, 10/5/2024
Musical Masterworks will feature the expressive continuum of the human voice on October 12th and 13th at the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, mixing songs of love across centuries, from the opera Pagliacci to the American standard “Frankie and Johnny.”
Artistic Director Tessa Lark, with guest artist Nathan Farrington, debuts a program pairing classical arias and modern American song in inventive juxtapositions — a “mini one-act opera” as Farrington says.
Farrington, a Los Angeles-based musician, composer and educator, brings his multi-dimensional talents as bassist and tenor. As an instrumentalist, he has played in orchestras across the country, from New York City to San Francisco. His development as a tenor was encouraged by his father, Michael Farrington, a tenor with the Army National Band in Vietnam and later the National Opera Company in D.C.
Farrington debuted with the Marlboro Music Festival Marlboro as a tenor soloist in the Beethoven Choral Fantasy in 2007. But he also blends genres, accompanying himself on bass and guitar to mesmerizing effect in pithy arrangements of the American songbook.
In a recent interview, Farrington noted,
“Humans have been feeling the same emotions for centuries and finding their own ways of expressing that. We are left, in the classical tradition, with these beautiful arias — somebody expressing love and heartbreak and loneliness in their own voice — but then we look forward 100 years, and Hank Williams has to get it off his chest the same say Puccini did.”
The October program also pays homage to the operatic origins of Musical Masterworks, Artistic Director Tessa Lark says. The first performance in 1990 was organized by (now Board President) Alden Murphy and her husband Jamie, who gathered a group of New York City music friends to their new home in Old Lyme. It was a full-blown staging of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera, The Mikado.
Since that convivial beginning, Musical Masterworks has maintained a history of presenting performances without program notes. Lark notes,
“We take the audience through the performance in real time, talking about the pieces onstage. In this concert, we want to look at how connected humans and culture are to the art of storytelling. And there’s a micro and macro level going on in this program. You have the theme of love, but then there’s this bigger arc connecting old and new music, and bringing to the foreground how music, storytelling, and love are addressed through different time periods.”
Farrington was a part of the MMModern performance in April 2024, where, as Lark says, “Everyone fell in love with him. He has the most virtuosic stage presence, and he charmed the pants off everybody.” Lark charged Farrington with a larger role in this upcoming concert, doing some of the programming as well as inviting two new performers into the Musical Masterworks fold, Marquita Richardson and Sarah Saturnino, a Grand Finalist in The Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition in 2023.
Farrington notes,
“Of all of the classical music I’ve experienced, which is a pretty broad array, opera is the most visceral. There’s not a lot between the audience and what’s coming out of that voice. Really, instruments are just trying to imitate that voice. And there is a class of voices who are waiting for the stage, in the prime of their lives. They are ready and need to be heard. Marquita and Sarah are those voices.”
Completing the chamber music program is Roman Rabinovitch, a pianist, composer, visual artist, and director — “a true polymath, in the Renaissance sense of the word” as quoted in Seen & Heard International in 2016.
Lark brings her own amalgam of influences to the stage in her work as a violinist. A Kentucky native, she grew up balancing bluegrass fiddling and classical violin. She spoke about a new emerging sensibility in musicianship:
“People are calling it ‘the modern musician,’ but it’s old roots. It’s just about making space for diverse musical interests. Now, Nate is unique. I don’t think I know of another bassist/tenor. But we have moved into a place in classical music where he can perform all of it. At Musical Masterworks we can make space for that huge array.”
Farrington seconded this idea:
“The truth of the matter is that classical music has been looking for a lifeline for a long time, on the small stage. And the pandemic gave space to explore that a bit more. Someone was wise enough to give Tessa the helm at Musical Masterworks. And once people give these directorships to creative people, there’s no going back. Tessa came out of school with one of the finest records in classical achievement, but she’s open to this larger world of exploration. You in Connecticut are the beneficiaries of that.”
