Register Now! Space is Limited!
Please join us for our 21st Annual Founders’ Day Dinner of The Richard Wagner Society of the Upper Midwest, featuring a music program with pianist Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell, bass-baritone Jonathan Prescott, and tenor John Charles Pierce.
You must register by Wednesday, September 4 to attend. Walk-ins cannot be accommodated. The registration price includes the program and pre-program wine and appetizers.
Attendees may order their own dinner from the following menu of German specialties:
Summer Vegetable Tart with green salad (meatless option) - $10.75
Hungarian Goulash:
- Large option - $18.25
- Small option - $10.75
Sausage sampler:
- Three different sausages with potato salad - $16.00
- Two sausages (bratwurst, chicken curry, or Polish) with rye bread - $11.50
- One sausage (your choice) with potato salad - $9.00
$30 RWSUM members
$40 Non-members. Includes RWSUM membership for the remainder of 2019.
We hope you will join us for a spectacular Wagnerian evening!
Schedule:
4:00 Socializing—wine and appetizers
4:15 Business meeting—election of board members
4:30 Remarks by RWSUM President David Cline and discussion
4:45 Music program
5:15 Dinner
7:30 Event ends
Program:
Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell, Jonathan Prescott, and John Charles Pierce will treat us to a program of music and songs by Wagner and composers most closely linked to him, e.g. Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss (whose expressionist masterpiece, Elektra, is being performed by the Minnesota Opera this fall) with commentary to highlight their musical and stylistic connections.
Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell, Pianist
London-born pianist Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell resides in the Twin Cities. He received his musical training in England, France and at the Juilliard School, and has performed throughout Europe and the United States, most notably at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, having been based in London, New York, Boston and the Twin Cities.
Roderick’s multifaceted musical career includes song recitals, chamber music, conducting choirs, orchestras and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and collaborating with violinists to saxophonists. He is also playing more solo concerts on piano and fortepiano in recent years. In addition, he has played Broadway shows, worked in straight theater, and coaches opera, musical theater and song repertoire.
Currently he is finishing a memoir for Calumet Editions, incorporating how to develop more imagination, creativity and expression in the training of musicians. He also has a vision to provide an innovative space for musicians to continue their growth after college and to expand their artistic and professional opportunities.
More information can be found at www.amademusic.com.
Jonathan Prescott, Bass-Baritone
For Jonathan Prescott’s performance as Gremin in Eugene Onegin, the Zürcher Zeitung wrote: “Jonathan Prescott possesses a voice of unusual, individual character and the enviable ability to craft powerful and beautiful legato lines”. For his performance of Claggart in Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, the Kansas City Star wrote: “No mere villain, Jonathan Prescott’s Claggart was as tragic as he was evil”.
Mr. Prescott has sung more than 1000 performances of 60 operatic roles in the United States and Europe, including Wotan in Die Walküre, Philip II in Don Carlos, Banquo in Macbeth, and Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte.
Mr. Prescott has been heard in performances at theaters in Zurich, Basel and Bern, Switzerland…Freiburg, Ulm, Heidelberg, Wiesbaden and Hannover, Germany……and in many American opera houses including Boston, Detroit, Austin, New York, Phoenix, Tucson, and Atlanta. He has been engaged by leading conductors including Nello Santi, Gerd Albrecht, Nicholas Harnoncourt, Ralf Weikert, Christoff Perrick, Ferdinand Leitner and Antal Dorati.
No stranger to the orchestral repertoire, Mr. Prescott has performed many concert works including the Verdi Requiem, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Missa Solemnis, the Brahms Requiem, the Mozart Requiem, and Rossini’s Stabat Mater.
Mr. Prescott is a graduate of Tufts University where he started his musical career as a composition student. He holds a master’s degree from the Boston University School of Music where he studied voice with Chloe Owen.
He now resides with his wife in the Twin Cities area.
John Charles Pierce, Tenor
One of the leading heldentenors of his generation, John Charles Pierce has sung in opera houses and concert halls around the world. His interpretation of the role of Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a pinnacle of the tenor repertoire, has been the pillar of his career. In 1985, he was an apprentice with Santa Fe Opera and a Metropolitan Opera Regional Finalist as a baritone. After making the switch to dramatic tenor, he sang full-time at the Brandenburg State Opera in Cottbus for ten years. There he sang much of the important repertoire for his voice type, including Wagner’s Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Rheingold, Walküre and Flying Dutchman, Verdi’s Otello, Hoffman, Freischütz, Fidelio, Jenufa, Katia Kabanova, Pique Dame, Samson and Delilah and many others.