Vocal Music from the Last Century to Our Days

March 7, 2026, at 6 PM
John Jacob Niles Gallery
Lucille Little Fine Arts Library

Vocal Music from the last century to our days

Daniela D’Ingiullo, soprano
Jacob Coleman, piano

This recital traces a musical journey spanning more than a hundred years, moving from early twentieth‑century reimaginings of ancient texts to the experimental languages of the present day. At the dawn of the century, Maurice Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques (1904) offers a luminous encounter with the folk traditions of Chios, filtered through Michel‑Dimitri Calvocoressi’s French translations. A few decades later, Alfredo Casella’s Tre canzoni trecentesche (1923) turns to fourteenth‑century Italian poetry, recasting medieval verse within a neoclassical framework that balances clarity, elegance, and expressive restraint. Luciano Berio’s Four Folk Songs (1947) continues this dialogue between past and present, weaving Sicilian, Genoese, and early Italian sources into a refined, modern sonic tapestry.

From these early and mid‑century perspectives, the program moves into the contemporary world, where the voice encounters new aesthetic and technological landscapes. George E. Lewis’s Memorial (2015), written for voice and fixed electronic sound, sets a text by South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile and explores resonance, remembrance, and the shifting boundaries between human presence and electronic space. Juan Trigos’s Four Songs After Poems by Ezra Pound (2017) brings the journey into the twenty‑first century, reframing Pound’s concise, imagistic poetry through a compositional language marked by structural clarity, expressive economy, and a deep engagement with text.

Together, these works chart a century‑long arc in which folk memory, medieval poetry, modernist reinvention, and contemporary experimentation coexist, revealing how the singing voice continues to evolve while remaining rooted in the timeless impulse to give sound to words.

Soprano Daniela D’Ingiullo is an interpreter whose work spans early vocal traditions, twentieth‑century modernism, and contemporary music, with a repertoire ranging from Respighi and Stravinsky to Berio, George E. Lewis, and Juan Trigos. Her long‑standing collaboration with Trigos includes the award‑winning recording of his Symphony No. 4 and leading roles in several of his operas, alongside performances across Europe and the Americas with conductors such as Callegari, Frizza, Neuhold, and Mester. Active as both performer and producer, she appears on multiple recordings and develops international opera and ensemble projects.

Pianist Jacob Coleman, Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, is an accomplished collaborator who has performed with leading artists including Franklin Cohen, David Kim, and Leone Buyse, and has appeared at major festivals and conferences throughout the United States and abroad. Formerly on the faculties of the University of Southern Mississippi and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, he has also served on the piano staff of the Meadowmount School of Music. He holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Oregon, and the University of Georgia.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Last Hundred