CHICAGO — To mark its 15th-anniversary season, the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago has rebranded itself as Art Song Chicago, a welcome change that was long overdue. The ambiguous original name probably did the group no favors when it came to marketing and fundraising. This new appellation clearly tells the world what the organization’s important mission is: preserving, promoting, and presenting the wonderful marriage of music and poetry known as art song.
Art song used to be a regular part of the offerings on concert series across North America, but with shrinking music education and changing tastes, the audiences for such performances have dwindled. The result has been a significant and unfortunate decline. These works have so much to offer listeners willing to dig in and give them a chance. It is impossible to fully appreciate Franz Schubert, for example, without knowing his song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) (1828), a deeply moving setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller that stands as one of the great vocal masterpieces of all time.
Founded by pianists Nicholas Hutchinson and Shannon McGinnis and tenor Nicholas Phan, Art Song Chicago has made art song old and new its central focus. One of its most ambitious efforts has been its annual Collaborative Works Festival, the latest installment of which took place Sept. 4 and 6 in Roosevelt University’s Ganz Hall. The 195-seat venue in Chicago’s 1889 Auditorium Building, designed by Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, and their then-apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright, offers a stunning mix of art and architecture.
Phan, who won a 2025 Grammy Award for best opera recording for his role in Kaijo Saariaho’s Adriana Mater with the San Francisco Symphony, is the heart and soul of Art Song Chicago both onstage and off. In his role as founding artistic director, he chose the line-ups for this latest edition of the festival with the care and intelligence he always brings to the organization’s programming. While Art Song Chicago has never ignored the pillars of the repertoire, it has tended to emphasize less widely known works and composers from the past and introduce new songs, and that was the case here.
The two programs were simply titled, respectively, War and Peace, with the first, the one reviewed here, using art song to examine the horrendous impact of conflict on soldiers and their families as well as civilians caught in the violence. “In a moment when multiple wars range across the globe and claim untold innocent lives,” Phan wrote in his program essay, “this year’s theme feels both urgent and necessary. In an age when we are increasingly drawn into the online realm, song offers a space for real-world communion.”
Five singers took part in the opening concert, but Phan was the program’s anchor, shining each time he took the stage. Even some of the greatest opera singers have had limited success in the art-song repertoire, which unlike the grand scale and power of opera puts an emphasis on intimacy and inwardness. To be successful, a singer does not so much perform art songs as enter into and inhabit these miniature worlds, serving more as a musical storyteller than an actor. Phan is the epitome of such an interpreter, as he showed in Britten’s Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain.
Britten, whose sensitivity to the themes of this festival was further reinforced in his landmark War Requiem (1962), composed this 11-minute work in 1945, setting an Edith Sitwell poem she wrote in 1940 shortly after the Blitz, the German air attacks on London. It juxtaposes the horror of those attacks to Christ’s suffering on the Cross. The six text settings in the canticle alternate with instrumental theme-and-variations featuring either French horn or piano, the two only coming together at the very end.
Mark Almond, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal horn, potently realized his probing solos, using two different mutes at times to draw maximum expressiveness from his instrument. Here and throughout the concert, Kuang-Hao Huang showed himself to be a first-rate collaborative pianist, adapting to the myriad styles and moods of these songs and ably supporting his vocal partners.
That said, the star in Britten’s Canticle III was Phan. He brought a piercing intensity to the six text sections, capturing the ever-changing emotions from mournfulness to anger to pain and delivering each recurrence of the title stanza, “Still Falls the Rain,” a metaphor for the endlessly falling bombs, with subtly varied interpretative shadings.
One of today’s leading American composers of art song is Nico Muhly, whose five-part song cycle, The Last Letter, debuted at London’s Barbican Centre in 2015. Other than the final song, which uses an English translation of a small section of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, the settings are drawn from actual World War II letters. Baritone Schyler Vargas was at his best here, ably handling the ever-changing tone and feel of these letters, from the grim announcement that a wife is divorcing her prisoner-of-war husband to a surprisingly humorous missive from a sex-starved wife begging a commanding officer to give her husband leave to come home.
Other notable moments included:
- Charles Ives, “He is There!” from Three Songs of War (1917). While many of the selections were dark ruminations on war, this folk-tinged concert opener was a rah-rah patriotic call to action focused on a young man on his way to fight in World War I. “’Hip Hip Hooray!’ is all he’ll say, as he marches to the Flanders front,” state two lines from the song. Vargas offered a rousing, energetic take on this welcome example by one of this country’s greatest art-song composers.
- Errollyn Wallen, Roundel (2020). Wallen, a Belize-born British composer, uses a poem by Vera Brittain, who lost both her fiancé and her brother in World War I. It was performed here by baritone Leroy Davis and mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams, who powerfully conveyed the song’s forlorn sense of loss and emptiness. It ends as it began with the devastating words “Because you died,” which the two singers repeat, echoing each other in ghostly fashion.
- Mohammed Fairouz, Refugee Blues (2011). This compelling setting of W.H. Auden’s 1939 poem about despair and displacement was created by the 39-year-old Arab-American composer who has written extensively for the voice. After arguably overselling a couple of earlier selections, soprano Raquel González offered a reading that was direct, sometimes understated, and always involving.
Also on the program were works by Samuel Barber, Nadia Boulanger, Claude Debussy, Henri Duparc, Gustav Mahler, Robert Schumann, and Kurt Weill. The concert concluded with “God Be With Our Boys Tonight,” a popular American World War I song written by Wilfrid Sanderson and Fred G. Bowles in 1918.
