Contact: Morgan Tubbs
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Internationally recognized singer and composer Dawn Sonntag will be featured Thursday [April 11] in a collaborative recital with Mississippi State faculty members.
Free to all, the university program begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Robert and Freda Harrison Auditorium of Giles Hall.
Sonntag, an assistant professor of music at Hiram (Ohio) College, will be performing selections by Schubert, Sibelius, Mozart, Rossini and Crumb, as well as original commissioned song-settings drawn from the poetry of Walt Whitman and Sara Teasdale.
Tara Warfield, MSU music department voice area coordinator, will join Sonntag in operatic duets from Mozart, Mendelssohn and Rossini. Linda Elliott, a member of the department's horn faculty, will perform with Sonntag on Franz Lachner's "Waldärts."
Karen Murphy, departmental coordinator of collaborative piano, will provide piano accompaniment, while Nancy D. Hargrove, Distinguished Giles Professor Emerita of English, will speak about Walt Whitman as an introduction to Sonntag's song-setting of "Come Up from the Fields, Father."
Sonntag has performed opera, oratorio and art song repertoires on stages across the U.S., as well as in France, Germany and Norway. She also has appeared with the Florentine Opera of Milwaukee, Wis. and Chamizal National Theater of El Paso, Texas, among other venues.
As a soloist, she has been featured with numerous chamber and community choirs in the U.S. and Germany.
Her commissions have included works for the 2008 International Leif Eriksson Festival and Luther Seminary's "All God's People Sing" 25th Anniversary Reformation Festival; settings of poetry by Iowa Poet Laureate Marvin Bell; and music for the PBS documentary film, "Voice to Vision."
Her choral works have been performed by choirs at the Ohio State University and Augsburg and Hiram colleges, Oslo University, and the University of Minnesota, among others.
For more information on the event, contact Murphy at kmurphy@colled.msstate.edu.