SONGS FOR STEPHEN: The upcoming recording of works by composer Elena Ruehr represents a nearly three-decade collaboration between esteemed composer Elena Ruehr and celebrated baritone Stephen Salters.
by Patrick D. McCoy
Composer Elena Ruehr
The names of both celebrated musicians: composer Elena Ruehr and baritone Stephen Salters may resonate with DC audiences from their being featured with The Washington Chorus concert “New Music for a New Age.” This new recording “Songs for Stephen” set for release May 2, 2025 on Avie Records represents a nearly three-decade collaboration between Elena Ruehr and Stephen Salters. Ruehr describes the time “a handsome and charismatic young man approached me after a premiere of one of my compositions at Boston University. He asked me to write him a song cycle for his debut recital with the Bank of Boston’s Celebrity Series. I told him to send me a recording of his singing and I’d think about it. The first note I heard Stephen sing sent a bolt of energy down my spine: this was the singer I had always wanted to write for!”
Salters shared more about the meaningful collaboration with Ruehr. “What a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration has landed in my life both professionally and personally with Elena.
From my first personal musical envelopment of her first song ever written for me, I truly fell in love with her creations for me, and thus we began this truly special and unique journey.”
Featured on this new recording, Ruehr sets some of America’s most notable poets, including Cuban American and National Humanities Medal recipient Richard Blanco, who read his own work at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. Obama, himself is a subject in Guggenheim Fellow Elizabeth Alexander’s work Five Men, also included in this anthology. Alexander adds to the liner notes,
“In these poems, now set to exquisite and soul-stirring music by Elena Ruehr and sung to the heavens by Stephen Salters, Black men speak across two centuries. How they think about freedom is varied; each sings from both his historical moment as well as an interior space that is lyrical, exploratory, and visionary.”
Baritone Stephen Salters
Ruehr also sets poetry for children – both dark and light – from leading light of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes and feminist-activist Adrienne Rich. The addition of the four-minute Lied, set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, is a reference to Ruehr’s Germanic ancestry as well as to the first song – by Schubert – that Ruehr heard Salters sing.
Composer Elena Ruehr is currently the composer in residence with Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra, she has a major list of recordings including her orchestral works (O’Keeffe Images, BMOP/sound) as well as the opera Toussaint Before the Spirits (BMOP/sound), her cantatas Averno (with the Trinity Choir, Avie), and her Six String Quartets (the Cypress String Quartet, Borromeo String Quartet and Stephen Salters, Avie). Her other recordings include Icarus (Avie), Jane Wang considers the dragonfly (Albany), Lift (Avie), Shimmer (Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble, Albany) and Shadow Light (The New Orchestra of Washington with Marcus Thompson, Acis), as well as many others. In addition to having a standing collaboration with QuartetES, her works have been commissioned, recorded, and performed by numerous other string quartets, including the Arneis, Biava, Borromeo, Cypress, Delgani, Lark, Quartet Nouveau, Roco and Shanghai string quartets. An award-winning faculty member at MIT, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Known for her vocal music and collaboration with poets, she has written five operas, five cantatas and a number of songs. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School, and has also written extensively for orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble, chamber ensemble, instrumental solo, opera, dance and silent film. Her work has been performed internationally and described as ‘sumptuously scored and full of soaring melodies’ (New York Times) and ‘unspeakably gorgeous’ (Gramophone). Dr. Ruehr has taught at MIT since 1992 and lives in Boston.
Baritone Stephen Salters, who is particularly known to Washington, DC audiences as a featured soloist with The Washington Chorus currently is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Voice at the University of Tennessee. He has performed extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, the UK and the USA. Salters created the title role in Elena Ruehr’s tour de force dance opera Toussaint Before the Spirits for Opera Boston and premiered Ruehr’s Crafting the Bonds about American writer and former slave Hannah Bond. Recent appearances include Wagner’s Rienzi and Walton’s The Bear at Boston’s Odyssey Opera, Philip Glass’s Symphony No.5 at the Kennedy Center and at New York City’s Trinity Church, a historic sesquicentennial vocal recital honoring Harry T. Burleigh at Skidmore College, and Mr. Salter’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, singing in Central Park for over 100,000 spectators. Other highlights include concerts with the orchestras and symphonies of Baltimore, Belgium, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Frankfurt, Houston, Minnesota, Monte Carlo, Paris, Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Francisco, Tokyo and St. Luke’s and appearances at Tanglewood, Ravinia, Pietrasanta, Vail and other American and European festivals; world premieres of Ysaye Barnwell’s Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, Daniel Sonenberg’s The Summer King, Philippe Fénelon’s Les Rois; Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Orvieto, Italy; Shostakovich’s The Nose; Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; Gluck’s Alceste; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte; Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and L’elisir d’amore; Handel’s Alcina and Giulio Cesare; Rossini’s La Cenerentola; Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci; and Britten’s Peter Grimes at Tanglewood on the 50th anniversary of that work’s US premiere. Mr. Salters has demonstrated his versatility on the concert stage, from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion through all styles and periods of the traditional repertoire until Mahler’s Symphony No.8 and beyond. A versatile stylist, he has also appeared in pops programs, including with the Boston Pops on their national holiday tour. A celebrated recitalist, Mr. Salters has thrilled and moved audiences all over the world and is a much sought-after interpreter and advocate of new music. He conducts masterclasses and has a residency called Until Now: Discovering Your Life-Force. He has worked with leading conductors including Christoph Eschenbach, Seiji Ozawa, Robert Spano, Bobby McFerrin, Nicholas McGegan, Keith Lockhart, Leonard Slatkin, Hugh Wolff, Jane Glover and Julian Wachner. His most recent recordings include Spirit: Are You There? You Are There and several world-premiere performances and recordings including William Bolcom’s Billy in the Darbies (written for Mr. Salters and the Lark String Quartet) and Elena Ruehr’s Toussaint Before the Spirits, Averno and Gospel Cha-Cha.
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For this recording, Salters collaborates with two of the world’s leading pianists:
Pianist Donald Berman
Donald Berman’s recordings include The Unknown Ives Volumes 1 and 2, The Uncovered Ruggles, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives with Susan Narucki (New World), the 4-CD set Americans in Rome (Bridge) and the Avie recordings This Island and The Edge of Silence with Narucki, Icarus with the Borromeo Quartet, and The ‘Concord’ Sonata. Berman is Chair of Piano at The Longy School of Music of Bard College, President of The Charles Ives Society and General Editor for the three-volume Shorter Piano Works of Charles E. Ives (Peer and AMP/G. Schirmer).
Pianist David Zobel
French pianist David Zobel enjoys a successful career as a collaborative pianist, opera coach and accompanist, performing in opera houses and at international festivals throughout France and the rest of Europe. For over a decade now, he has been regularly collaborating with acclaimed mezzosoprano Joyce DiDonato, playing in some of the world’s most prestigious venues and also accompanying Ms. DiDonato on her first solo album, The Deepest Desire, which features an array of American songs by Bernstein, Copland and Jake Heggie and was awarded the Diapason d’Or de l’année in France. Mr. Zobel and internationally acclaimed baritone Stephen Salters have collaborated as a duo for over two decades; after starting out at Juilliard, they have appeared together at the world’s greatest concert halls and festivals, with several recitals at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood and Ravinia, among others. Mr. Zobel has also accompanied singers at renowned competitions such as Operalia, the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Le Concours Reine Elisabeth and the Belvedere Singing competition, to name but a few. Mr. Zobel is a graduate of the Toulouse and Paris conservatories and The Juilliard School. He is also a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship and the Sony ES Award for Musical Excellence.
Tracklist:
ELENA RUEHR (b. 1963)
Songs for Stephen
Five Men
Elizabeth Alexander
1 I. Blue Prelude 3.44
2 II. Waiting for Cinque 3.06
3. III. Nat Turner Dreams of Insurrection 4.30
4. IV. Carver’s Song 2.35
5. V. The Elders 2.48
6. Lied 4.11
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
sung in German
Travel Songs
Richard Blanco: Directions to the Beach of the Dead
7. I. Somewhere to Paris 4.10
8. II. A Poet in Venicen 7.16
9. III. Torsos at the Louvre 4.59
10. Wonderful Bears 5.08
Adrienne Rich: Bears
Stephen Salters, baritone
Donald Berman, piano
Lullabies & Spring Songs
Langston Hughes
11. I. Signs of Spring 1.11
12. II. April Rain 3.01
13. III. City 2.06
14. IV. Sandman 3.45
15. V. Year Round 1.10
16. VI. Autumn Thought 1.40
17. VII. Stars 4.03
Stephen Salters, baritone
David Zobel, piano
Tracks 11–17: Recording: August 1999, Futura Productions, Roslindale, Massachusetts, USA
Recording Producer & Engineer: Joel Gordon
A native of Petersburg, VA, Patrick holds a BM in Vocal Performance from Virginia State University and a MM in Church Music from Shenandoah Conservatory. Formerly the Performing Arts Columnist for Washington Life Magazine, he currently is a freelance writer, publishing articles for several noted publications and organizations, including The Washington Post, Early Music America, Classical Music Voice North America, The Afro-American Newspaper, Prince George’s Suite Magazine, CBS Washington, Examiner.com and Washington Classical Review. He holds membership in the Music Critics Association of North America, National Association of Negro Musicians, Inc., American Choral Directors’ Association, Association of Anglican Musicians, a former member of the Shenandoah University Alumni Board of Directors, a member of the Shenandoah University Black Alumni Network, a Life Member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. and a member of the Sigma Zeta Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity of America. As an alumnus of Shenandoah, he was named to the Dean’s Circle of the Shenandoah Conservatory Advisory Board. He enters his 7th year as Organist/Choirmaster at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, Zion Parish in Beltsville, MD. Patrick is the host of “Across the Arts” both a live and virtual media platform covering the performing arts. Visit http://patrickdmccoy.com and follow him on Facebook and Twitter @PatrickDMcCoy, IG: PDM06. and subscribe to “Across the Arts” on YouTube.