With familiar guests, 1st QC foray into Fauré

Two familiar faces will join the Quad City Symphony Orchestra this weekend as vocal soloists.

Baritone Nathaniel Sullivan (who grew up in the QC) and soprano Sarah Shafer will return to shine in the first QCSO performance of the Requiem by French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924).

This will be Sullivan’s first solo foray into the Fauré, and Shafer has done it at least four times, but not recently. She’s a little surprised the QCSO has never performed it (the church version debuted in 1888 and the concert version in 1900) over its 109-season history.

“It’s kind of a standard, maybe not done as much as the Mozart Requiem, but it’s done pretty regularly,” she said in a recent interview with Our Quad Cities News. “It’s very uniquely French — it feels very ethereal. It’s celestial, it has really beautiful strings. It’s a unique string sound.”

“Unlike many composers in general, he doesn’t really use high strings throughout,” Sullivan said. “It’s a very warm sound that he gets from the orchestra.”

Similar to the Brahms Requiem, the Fauré is more focused on the comfort of death and promise of eternal rest. Composed after the loss of his parents, Fauré balances profound sorrow and longing with light, hope, and the exultation of heaven.

“The human nature of this thing, as opposed to the big, fiery day of wrath you get in the Mozart, the Verdi and Britten’s War Requiem,” Sullivan said. “It takes that wrathful element and puts it to the side, and makes it all about comfort, bringing us together through this experience.”

Fauré doesn’t use the traditional Dies Irae of the Requiem, or the Benedictus, but added a final movement, “In Paradisum,” which isn’t typically included, he said. That usually is reserved for the actual burial.

Shafer said that last section is so otherworldly.

“It’s this beautiful — the soprano chorus gets to have this beautiful, soaring melody that is joined with the rest of the chorus, and it’s like you’re being lifted up into heaven,” she said. “It’s so beautiful, it’s transporting.”

The Latin text of “In Paradisum” says in part: “There may the choirs of angels receive thee, and with Lazarus, once a beggar, may thou have eternal rest.”

Shafer has sung with the QCSO over a half dozen times, since her first solos here in October 2013 (including Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”).

She and Sullivan are also singing selected arias this weekend from the Bach St. Matthew Passion (only done once before by the QCSO, in 2018).

He has sung in choruses elsewhere for the Bach and Fauré, but this is his debut with the QCSO in a choral work.

“The maestro has been very kind to include me, from the very beginning of my career, up until now,” said Shafer, a 35-year-old Pennsylvania native, crediting QCSO music director Mark Russell Smith. Like him, she’s an alum of the famed Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

He conducted Shafer at Curtis, where she sang Barbarina in a production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.”

Sullivan is a 31-year-old Bettendorf High alum. He was heavily involved in music and theater there, including the inaugural year of Surround Sound (the BHS show choir).

He received his bachelor’s in music from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (2014) and his master’s from the Bard College Conservatory of Music (2017).

Sullivan’s recent highlights include singing The King in the North American premiere of George Benjamin’s “Lessons in Love and Violence” at Tanglewood; premiering two works for baritone and chamber ensemble with Contemporaneous at Carnegie Hall; the role of Manfred in Jake Heggie’s “Two Remain (Out of Darkness)” with the QCSO, and covering the role of Harvey Milk in the world premiere of Stewart Wallace’s “Harvey Milk Reimagined” at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

Sullivan was one of seven winners of the Astral Artists National Competition (2023) and has been awarded the Grace B. Jackson Prize for exceptional service at Tanglewood (2019),Third Place in the Washington International Competition (2023), and First Place in the NATS National Musical Theatre Competition (2018).

Shafer has performed around the world – including with the Metropolitan Opera as Azema in “Semiramide,” and Susanna in “Le Nozze di Figaro” with San Diego Opera. She was Barbarina and the cover of Susanna in “Figaro” at the Glyndebourne Festival and with the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall, and sung several roles for Opera Philadelphia.

Shafer enjoys an active collaboration with legendary pianist Richard Goode, having performed Schumann and Brahms lieder with him at Carnegie Hall, Spivey Hall, Chamber Music Sedona, and Chamber Music Society of Detroit as well as other venues in Palm Beach and New York.

Shafer was a resident artist at the Marlboro Music Festival for five summers, where she worked with Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida, Benita Valente, Sir Thomas Allen, and Martin Isepp. She actively appears with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Mozart and Handel Académie in Aix-en-Provence, Bard Summer Music Festival, and Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary.

Two landmark QC operas

Sullivan and Shafer (who also have sung at Carnegie Hall) partnered in special productions in the Quad Cities over the past few years.

They had leading roles in the world premiere of Jacob Bancks’s opera “Karkinos” with the QCSO in February 2022, and Jake Heggie’s opera “Two Remain (Out of Darkness)” in October 2022.

The premiere of “Karkinos” was Sullivan’s first experience with the QCSO, which premiered Feb. 12, 2022 at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center, Moline, penned by Augustana music professor Bancks, in tribute to cancer survivors and partnership with the former nonprofit Living Proof Exhibit.

The setting is a fantasy story, told by allegory, as the word “cancer” is never uttered in the opera. Karkinos (which means cancer in Greek) is a mostly unseen monster in the story, representing the dreaded disease.

“It was incredible. Jacob is the kind of composer that you dream of working with,” Sullivan said. “He took the time to really listen to us as the singers he was writing these roles for.”

“To really thoughtfully and beautifully put that into the score, it was a wonderful experience,” he said. “And to have it performed two years after it was originally scheduled, it felt like a triumphant return for the artists.”

And in his hometown, Sullivan had friends and family attend — including some from high school he hadn’t seen in years. “It was amazing.”

“It was really amazing — it took a while, but the passion behind the project, Jacob Bancks did so much beautiful work,” Shafer said. “With him talking to survivors and having that be part of the text. At the performance, having people come up to me and say, ‘This part you sang, I said that, that was my story.’ That really brought it home.”

“Their own words, set to Jacob’s beautiful music, really was unique and memorable for me in my career,” she said of local cancer survivors.

Both singers returned to the QC for “Two Remain,” at Augustana’s Brunner Theatre in October 2022, another new opera (with a QCSO chamber orchestra) and challenging subject. Heggie’s 2016 two-act opera centers on Holocaust survivors visited by ghosts of their past.

“It’s a tough piece — both musically and emotionally, but the cast they got was great,” Sullivan said. “It was thoughtful and honoring of the subject.”

He played a young poet, who was murdered with his family at Auschwitz. The opera presented him as a ghost recollection, in the mind of his childhood friend.

Shafer played a woman in a concentration camp, telling their story. It was also stressful putting together the opera in just a week, she said. It was her first time doing a Jake Heggie piece, and Sullivan had sung some of his art songs before.

“Two Remain” — part of the QC-wide “Out of Darkness” series of events — is based in part on the true stories of two Holocaust survivors: the Polish dissident Krystyna Zywulska (1914-1993) and the gay German Jew, Gad Beck (1923-2012).

The allure of new pieces

Both are thrilled to sing new works, especially world premieres.

“I really like to work with composers — then I get to say, this line works really well but this line is super hard,” Shafer said. “This doesn’t feel natural to me, and you get to have that dialogue with the composer, which is so awesome. It still feels so special to me to get to talk with the actual composer, because you usually don’t get to. You have to figure it out — you don’t get to talk to Mozart or Bach. I love that dialogue.”

“I love to put my little opinion in, and see what that sparks for the composer,” the soprano said

When she was in San Francisco, at age 24, Shafer got to do a new opera of “The Secret Garden,” based on the classic story that was made into a Broadway musical in 1991, and the Nolan Gasser opera premiered in 2013.

“It was a piece I had loved for my whole life,” she said, noting she sang the protagonist Mary Lennox. “I knew the character really well, without having to know the opera. I was able to bring things from my childhood experience of the story.”

Sullivan to cover the title role in Stewart Wallace’s “Harvey Milk Reimagined” in 2022, which first premiered in 1995, at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, another real-life character. Milk (1930-1978) was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, assassinated by a former San Francisco city supervisor.

“It was an incredible experience. I got to go down the wormhole of who Harvey was as a person,” he said. “His life was just so epic. It was short-lived, unfortunately, of course. But truly the time that he had was thoroughly lived.”

Premiering music can be high pressure, Shafer said.

“You look at it like any other piece of music — you do your best with what the composer has given you,” she said. “It is awesome to get to be the first person, but you do feel a bit of responsibility in sharing your opinions with the conductor, and people who may sing this after me.”

Sullivan said with well-known classic pieces, there’s a legacy singers have to live up to.

He loves doing solo recitals, with the intimate format, “it empowers you to have a more direct line of communication with the audience, and with the other musicians on stage,” he said.  “I also love the oratorio-type work.”

“You’re orating — you’re telling a message directly to the people in the room, and there’s something very human about that,” Sullivan said. “I love opera too, for the same reason. You’re in your own world, connecting with the audience but in a different way.”

With the Fauré Requiem, his movements bloom out of choral parts in the score, he said.

Shafer solos in the “Pie Jesu,” without chorus, very exposed. She said it’s much easier to sing with the chorus, as in the Brahms Requiem. “Movements like the Pie Jesu are a particular type of challenge — it’s like a rite of passage.”

Connecting with audiences

She loves the variety of her career — bringing the intimate feeling of the recital to singing with orchestra.

“There’s no feeling in the world like singing with the orchestra behind you — it’s my favorite thing in the whole world,” Shafer said. “But also being able to find the intimacy with the audience, when you’re singing with an orchestra. I love being able to take the feeling singing chamber music, or singing a recital, and finding the same feeling. We’re communicating in all cases.”

“Making the connection in any musical setting is what I’m after,” she added. “The variety and the challenge of finding it in a huge auditorium, or finding it even on an opera stage, is my favorite thing.”

The QCSO Masterworks concerts will feature six J.S. Bach pieces, including the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, and Prelude from the First Cello Suite. Other featured artists are cellist Hannah Holman, pianist Marian Lee, and Augustana Oratorio Society & Choral Artists, under the direction of Jon Hurty.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 2 at the Adler Theatre (136 E. 3^rd St., Davenport), and Sunday, March 3 at Centennial Hall (3703 7^th Ave., Rock Island). For tickets and more information, click HERE.

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