Jennifer Johnston mezzo-soprano
Joseph Middleton piano

Tickets:
£15 (standard)
Free (students)

One Life Stand

Jonathan Dove (1959-)
My Love is mine

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Canticle 1
The Birds
I Wonder as I Wander
At the mid hour of night
The last rose of summer
O waly, waly

Cheryl Frances-Hoad (1980-)
Two Shakespeare Songs

Joseph Horovitz (1926-2022)
Lady Macbeth

INTERVAL

Ned Rorem (1923-2022)
Look down fair moon
I will always love you
Jeanie with the light brown hair
Ferry me across the water
Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
The desire for hermitage
St Ita’s Vision
The monk and his cat
A green lowland of pianos
Sure on this shining night
Solitary Hotel

Cheryl Frances-Hoad
One Life Stand

“It packs a hefty emotional punch,” so wrote the BBC Music Magazine when reviewing Jennifer Johnston and Joseph Middleton’s world première recording of Frances-Hoad’s One Life Stand. It is a decade since Johnston and Middleton gave the first performance of this cycle at Opera North, during Cheryl’s tenure as Cultural Fellow in Operatic Composition at the University of Leeds, and it is one of the few contemporary cycles that has bedded itself into the song canon, heard frequently in concert halls and at festivals since its inception. Using texts by Sophie Hannah, it is a response to Schumann’s 1840 cycle Frauenliebe und-Leben. The rest of the programme draws a thread through English and American song, including a homage to Rorem, who died in November 2022. Jennifer Johnston is well known to Leeds Lieder audiences as having ‘one of the most generous and beautiful voices in the business’. She regularly appears at the BBC Proms and opera houses including La Scala Milan, and Munich, where a recent recording of Korngold with legendary tenor Jonas Kauffman won her Gramophone Award’s ‘Recording of the Year 2022’. Like Joseph Middleton, she has won a coveted Royal Philharmonic Award.

Presented in partnership with the University of Leeds.