“Music and Words” with David Rockefeller, Kathryn Knight, and Joel Sachs

Music and Words David Rockefeller, Jr., narrator Kathryn Knight, mezzo-soprano Joel Sachs, piano Richard Strauss (1864-1969) Melodrama: Das Schloss am Meere (The Castle by the Sea) (1899) Text: After a poem by Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862); new English rendering by Joel Sachs Franz Liszt (1811-1886 ) Lenore (158, rev. 1860) Ballade (1733), by Gottfried August Bürger (1747-1794) with melodramatic accompaniment by Franz Liszt. Translator unknown. Charles Ives (1974-1952) Autumn (1908); Text: Harmony T. Ives The Housatonic at Stockbridge (Text: Robert Underwood Johnson), 1921, after the orchestra piece of the same name) The New River (1921, after an instrumental piece, 1912); Text by Ives Tom Sails Away (1917 ); Text by Ives Nov. 2, 1920 (1921): Text by Ives Charles Ives: Two movements from Piano sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” Revised edition ca. 1940-47 Preceded by excerpts from Ives’s “Essays before a Sonata” read by David Rockefeller Jr. III The Alcotts (1915) IV Thoreau (1915) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Today’s program, highlighting the interaction between music and the written word, originated in the desire of David and me, college friends, to work together, and gradually expanded to include our English friend Kathryn. Having David read from Ives’s own brilliant essays about his sonata honoring the literary stars of Concord, Massachusetts, seemed like an improvement on the traditional program note, and having him read the texts of a group of Ives’s songs seemed appropriate to Ives’s careful fusions of words and music. It remains to say a word about the centuries-old tradition of “melodrama,” a genre fusing the spoken word with music. The most enduring example is Schoenberg’s masterpiece for actress and ensemble, Pierrot Lunaire, but the idea of fusing spoken poetry with musical accompaniment had originated in the 18th-century German-speaking world and probably stemmed from operatic recitative. (Actually, reciting the Greek dramas with musical accompaniment goes back at least 3000 years.) The idea of melodrama is unfortunately obscured by the related adjective “melodramatic,” with connotations of cheesy sentimentality. Since Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss were among the finest composers of the late period of melodrama, we chose one by each. They were not peripheral compositions: Strauss built his early reputation on extensive touring that featured his first melodrama, “Enoch Arden,” a huge piece whose text is by Tennyson, but recited by a famous actor in a German translation. He later added “The Castle by the Sea” to their tours. Since the published English version struck me as too rooted in sentimentality, I created a new translation preserving the poetic structure. The anonymous translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s popular ballade seemed usable despite some antiquated language. Although the text makes no mention of vampires, it is thought to have launched the fashion for vampire literature in the German-speaking world. – Joel Sachs The musical life of British mezzo-soprano Kathryn Knight began when her piano teacher urged her to apply to Oxford University to study music. Admitted as a pianist, she gravitated towards singing, since when she has enjoyed a varied performing career, thanks to a wide vocal range and even wider-ranging repertoire. Her programs include works across the millennium, from Pérotin to Arvo Pärt, and Byrd to Errollyn Wallen. Kathryn has sung and recorded with renowned vocal ensembles including Tenebrae, Gabrieli Consort and Tonus Peregrinus, performing throughout Europe. An accomplished recitalist, she is also the soprano in the Teahouse Baroque Cantata, which presents the repertoire in intimate performance. Appearances in 2026 span London, the Netherlands and New York. The desire to advance the legacies of earlier and living composers drove her to music publishing. Until 2023 she was President of Edition Peters New York, the major publisher of post-World War II American modernists. Its catalog includes John Cage, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, and Chou Wen-chung, and living composers such as George Lewis. Kathryn has appeared as a guest presenter on the BBC’s televised Proms concerts and Radio 3. All her work underlines her belief in the power of storytelling and musical context. David Rockefeller, Jr. has used his voice as a performing instrument since he was ten. In college, his rich bass voice earned him the nickname “Mr. Resonance” in the renowned men’s chorus The Harvard Glee Club, of which he was a devoted member. Long resident in the Boston area, he sang as a semi-professional chorister for more than forty years with Boston’s Cantata Singers and – more briefly – the Boston Camerata. More recently, David focused on narration with organizations like the Boston Pops and the Handel & Haydn Society. Since moving to New York City, David has been narrator for musical performances and reader of short stories and poetry at the Juilliard School, Alice Tully Hall, the Century Association, All Souls Church (for Musica Viva NY), and the Colony Club. He has also performed at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, the University of Mississippi (Strauss/Tennyson’s Enoch Arden), and at the Kennedy Center with the New Orchestra of Washington. He also has narrated three films directed by his wife, Susan Cohn Rockefeller, and was a reader for a five-CD set for Audible.com, in which he was the voice of Albert Einstein. As co-director of Continuum, and as an invited guest, pianist/conductor Joel Sachs has appeared in hundreds of performances in the Americas and throughout the Eurasian continent from England to Japan, Korea, China, and Indonesia. Although he is best known for his work in 20th– and 21st-century music, both Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 entered his traditional repertory recently. In 1993 he founded the New Juilliard Ensemble, a chamber orchestra for new music, conducting it in hundreds of premieres until retirement in 2022s. He also produced and directed Juilliard’s annual Focus! Festival of post-traditional music from 1985 to 2022 and Juilliard’s summer concerts at the MoMA from 1993 to 2009. All this has brought him into close contact with composers throughout the planet. He received Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Award to a conductor for service to American Music; honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard for his support of new music; the Gloria Artis Medal of the Polish Government for his service to Polish music; and a citation by the Music Publishers’ Association for advocacy of living composers. He is now emeritus professor of music at Juilliard. Always an active historian, he has published in many fields, including biographies of the composers Henry Cowell and J.N. Hummel.