Music from Copland House featuring Susan Graham

• Susan Graham, soprano

In its Atlanta premiere, A Standing Witness is a monumental new collaboration between Grammy Award–winning composer Richard Danielpour and Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, written especially for the incomparable mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and the celebrated Music from Copland House ensemble. The soaring music and probing poetry of this epic song cycle create a sweeping retrospective tracing enormous social and cultural upheavals in the United States since the watershed year of 1968. Rapturously received in premiere performances this season at the Kennedy Center, University of Chicago, and elsewhere around the United States, there is no more timely or provocative work for this pivotal moment in American history. 

About Candler Concert Series

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About Music from Copland House

Music From Copland House is the acclaimed resident ensemble at Aaron Copland's National Historic Landmark home in New York. Since its trium­phant New York debut as the Opening Night of Merkin Hall's 1999-2000 season, Music from Copland House (MCH) has come to occupy a special place on the U.S. musical scene as perhaps this country's only wide-ranging American repertory ensemble. Provocatively uniting past and present, American and non-American, it journeys across 150 years of our nation’s rich musical legacy, reaching back deep into the 19th Century and forward to just-completed compositions.

About Susan Graham, soprano

Susan Graham – hailed as "an artist to treasure" by The New York Times – rose to the highest echelon of international performers within just a few years of her professional debut, mastering an astonishing range of repertoire and genres along the way. Her operatic roles span four centuries, from Monteverdi’s Poppea to Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, which was written especially for her. A familiar face at New York's Metropolitan Opera, she also maintains a strong international presence at such key venues as Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, Santa Fe Opera, and the Hollywood Bowl. She won a Grammy Award for her collection of Ives songs, and has also been recognized throughout her career as one of the foremost exponents of French vocal music. Although a native of Texas, she was awarded the French government's prestigious "Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur," both for her popularity as a performer in France and in honor of her commitment to French music.