By Danielle Bettendorf
Living & arts editor
Susquehanna faculty Corrine Byrne and Dianna Grabowski will perform a joint recital featuring 17th-century Italian music on Sept. 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Stretansky Concert Hall.
Grabowski, adjunct faculty in music, emphasized that the joint recital has been in the works for a while.
“We have a lot of mutual acquaintances that are fellow singers and performers and we’ve since the beginning wanted to try to put together a program,” Grabowski said.
While this is the pair’s first recital together, Grabowski said they have previously performed together off campus.
“We’ve sung together at a couple places,” Grabowski said. “We’ve both done a lot of this music separately and we really wanted to try it together.”
“We really wanted to put something together here for this community,” Grabowski continued.
Byrne, soprano, and Grabowski, mezzo-soprano, will also perform with musician Dylan Sauerwald on harpsichord.
Byrne, assistant professor of music, has worked previously with Sauerwald, according to Grabowski.
Regarding the recital’s repertoire, Grabowski noted the emphasis on singing in the pieces chosen.
“The music of this time period was very vocal heavy,” Grabowski said. “It’s the beginning of when opera started to emerge and vocal music was just the main entertainment of the day.”
“They were kind of the celebrities of the day: the singers had jobs at royal courts and a lot of them were composers themselves,” Grabowski continued. “It was just the daily entertainment and these singers were doing some really impressive things: a lot of fast virtuosic singing that people don’t get a chance to hear and can be very surprising.”
Grabowski also said the type of music they will perform has risen in popularity more recently.
“Music from the Baroque era and earlier – this is more late Renaissance, early Baroque that we’re doing – it used to be less commonly performed and kind of a separate niche thing,” Grabowski said. “Nowadays in the last 20-30 years it’s become a lot more ‘mainstream.'”
“You see people doing a lot more versatility and crossover,” Grabowski added. “It’s starting to show its face all over the place.”
“It’s another reason why we wanted to do a program like this here,” Grabowski continued. “I don’t know if it’s been done very much here, but it is being done out there in the world.”
Grabowski also said that audience should pay attention to more than just the music.
“Pay attention to the text,” Grabowski said. “The music of this time, especially the vocal music, is very tied into the text… There’s obvious correlations from the text to the music.”
