MAURICE, LILI, AND THE PRIX DE ROME: MUSIC FOR CHOIR, SOLOISTS, AND CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

Program #3: February 8th at 7:30 pm

Maurice Ravel, L’aurore

Patrick Kilbride, tenor

Ravel, Shéhérazade
I. Asie
II. La La flûte enchantée
III. L’indifferent

Laura Choi Stuart, soprano

- A 15-minute intermission -

Lili Boulanger, Psaume CXXX: De fond du l’Abime

Gabriela Estaphanie Solis, mezzo-soprano
Patrick Kilbride, tenor

The Epiphany Festival Chorus and Chamber Orchestra
Andrew Jonathan Welch, conductor

Today’s Performers

Mezzo-soprano Gabriela Estephanie Solís lends her "rich tone" and “moving expressiveness” (San Francisco Classical Voice) to an expansive range of repertoire spanning medieval through contemporary periods. As a passionate concert artist, her notable solo performances from recent seasons include Copland’s In the Beginning (University of Notre Dame), Rachmaninoff’s All-night Vigil (California Bach Society), Mozart’s Requiem (Marin Symphony), Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody (Grace & St.Peter’s, Baltimore), Holst’s The Cloud Messenger (Georgetown Epiphany Festival), and selections from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder (Berkeley Community Chorus and Orchestra).

An avid interpreter of Baroque repertoire, she has collaborated with preeminent early music organizations such as Tempesta di Mare, Apollo’s Fire, American Bach Soloists, and the Boston Early Music Festival in performances of Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans (Tempesta di Mare), Bach’s B Minor Mass (American Bach Soloists), Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (Resonance Berkeley), Handel’s Messiah (Seraphic Fire), Vivaldi’s Gloria (Chora Nova), Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (University of Notre Dame), and Zelenka’s Missa Divi Xaverii (California Bach Society), as well as the roles of Medoro in Handel’s Orlando (BEMF Young Artist Training Program), Bradamante in Handel’s Alcina, and Endimione in Cavalli’s La Calisto at San Francisco State University under the direction of Christine Brandes. She also had the privilege of studying at the Weimar Bach Cantata Academy, Amherst Early Music Festival, and the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart.

In demand as an ensemble artist, she enjoys regular collaborations with groups such as Seraphic Fire, Lorelei Ensemble, and Apollo’s Fire. She competed as a finalist in both the 2022 Handel Aria Competition and the 2021 Audrey Rooney Bach Competition, won second place in the NATS mid-Atlantic regionals, and won first place in the 2018 Bethlehem Bach Aria Competition.

Praised for his “beautiful”, “sweet-voiced” tone, and “superbly acted” portrayals, Patrick Kilbride, tenor, is enjoying an international career, specializing in music from the Baroque and Classical periods. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Maryland Opera Studio. He completed additional studies as a Vocal Fellow with the Aspen Opera Theater Center, The Tanglewood Music Center, and the Académie with Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Patrick was the winner of the 24th International Concours de Chant in Clermont-Ferrand, France, debuting in the opera houses of Rennes, Clermont-Ferrand, Chaise Dieu, and Avignon in Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Damien Guillon and Le Banquet Céleste. He has sung roles with Festival Aix-en-Provence in the opera houses of Paris, Luxembourg, and the Royal Opera Versailles with Leonardo García Alarcón; at the Britten-Pears Aldeburgh Festival Snape Maltings Concert Hall with Christian Cornyn, and with Opéra National du Rhin in their critically acclaimed, new production of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, conducted by Raphaël Pichon with Ensemble Pygmalion.

In the United States Patrick has performed extensively with Washington, DC’s Opera Lafayette, the Boston Early Music Festival and Annapolis Opera, and as a concert soloist he has appeared with the Washington Bach Consort, Cathedral Choral Society, Grammy award-winning Seraphic Fire, the New World Symphony, and Fort Worth Symphony, in venues including The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; in New York at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Concert Hall. Future performances include engagements with the Washington Bach Consort, Annapolis Opera, Opera Baltimore, and an international tour of Handel’s Theodora with Ensemble Jupiter in Toulouse, Versailles, Madrid, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Bordeaux, Brussels, Dijon, Montpellier, Rouen and Metz. Passionate about voice science and pedagogy, he aims to begin his certification in Vocology with the National Center for Voice and Speech and the University of Utah in summer 2025. He is a Lecturer for the University of Maryland Opera Studio, and is a member of the American Guild of Musical Artists. www.PatrickKilbride.com

Program Notes

Thank you for attending this evening’s performance: we are so glad to be presenting these two works by Ravel alongside the Washington D.C. premiere of Lili Boulanger’s Psaume CXXX. Tonight’s performance concludes our 2025 festival where we pay tribute to the remarkable life and career of Ravel. But what connects these three pieces and these two remarkable composers together?

The Prix de Rome was the top prize in French composition, and had been won by numerous top French composers, including Debussy, Bizet, and Dubois. Despite achieving remarkable professional success both inside and outside of he Paris Conservatoire, Ravel had entered the competition 4 times and not yet won. In 1905, he entered for the final time and, alongside the other required compositions, submitted a cantata for tenor soloist, chorus, and orchestra, L’aurore. When Ravel failed to even advance to the final round and it was revealed that all finalists were students of jury members, a scandal erupted that was so large it eventually took down Théodore Dubois as the head of the conservatory. L’aurore, with its gentle portrayal of the rising sun, brings an immediate comparison to Ravel’s much later (and wildly successful) Daphnis et Chloe, especially the sublime “lever du jour.” L’aurore may not match the full power of Ravel’s later masterpiece, but one can decidedly hear the work of a fine, emerging talent.

Should you want to judge the merits of Ravel’s L’aurore, Shéhérazade is an excellent marker as it was written in the same year, 1905. Ravel had long admired the stories of Scheherazade, the gifted storyteller in Arabian Nights who staves off assassination by her tempestuous king by regaling him each evening with intentionally inconclusive stories, forcing him to spare her life if he wished to hear the ending. Shéhérazade is a setting of three poems by Tristan Klingsor, a friend of Ravel’s who was inspired to write the poems by Rimsky-Korsakov’s earlier orchestral work of the same name. The song cycle displays the then 30-year-old Ravel at his peak abilities: in my adaptation for chamber ensemble, I have hoped to preserve as much of his dazzling orchestration as possible, but his gift for harmonic color and melodic line is present throughout the work.

Lili Boulanger'‘s Psaume CXXX concludes our program for two reasons: the first is her shared connection with Ravel to the Prix de Rome. Unlike Ravel, Lili Boulanger made history when, at age 19 in 1913, she was the first female winner of the competition. The jury, reformed since Ravel’s years of competing, keenly recognized her incredible gifts and talents; her historic victory paved the way for four additional women to win between 1913 and 1939. Unfortunately, Boulanger suffered from chronic illness, and died in 1918 at the age of 24. Psaume CXXX is one of her final and longest extant works, and the choice of text is deeply personal when one considers her recognition of her own mortality and remembers that the era of its composition was marked by unimaginable loss and strife (1914-1917.) It is also, for my ear, one of the finest choral masterworks I’ve had the privilege to lead - this is the second, and perhaps more important, reason we are presenting it tonight, in its first known performance in Washington D.C.

It is my hope that these works inspire you to learn more about these conductors and this remarkable time period for musical composition. As part of our festival, we have worked through a new musical typesetting of the score and created new, 15-instrument orchestrations for each of these works: we’ve done these primarily in the hope that these works will be as accessible as possible for future choral organizations to use and promote these remarkable works.

Text and Translations

Ravel, L’aurore

Ravel, Shéhérazade

Boulanger, Psaume CXXX