Join us to experience a performance of Winterreise, a song cycle by Franz Schubert. This collection of twenty-four songs was inspired by the poems of 19th-century poet Wilhelm Müller about a young man who, upon seeing his beloved marry another, sets out on foot in deepest winter to grieve his loss and seek solace.
The work will be performed without an intermission.
Program
| Composer | Work | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Franz Schubert | Winterreise, D. 911 | 1827 |
About the Artists
Evan Luca Gray
Evan Luca Gray is a bass-baritone from Winterthur, Switzerland. Evan was introduced to singing through the Zurich Boys Choir at age 8 and sang in the alto voices until age 15. After his voice changed, he joined the bass section and received his first opportunities as a soloist. Evan remained with the choir until 2019 and remains closely engaged with it.
At age 17, Evan enrolled in an arts-based high school and began taking voice lessons with David and Jane Thorner at the Winterthur Conservatory. He also received instruction there in piano and music theory.
Evan entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2019. While at Curtis he has had the opportunity to perform operatic roles such as The Forester in Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen, Figaro in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, and Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He has also performed in concerts and recitals at Curtis and in the outside community.
An accomplished recitalist, Evan has performed both Schubert’s Winterreise and Ralph Vaughn William’s Songs of Travel. He has a deep love for contemporary music and has commissioned several works for chamber ensemble and voice. Evan was a resident artist at the Marlboro Music Festival in 2023–2024 and had the chance to delve into chamber repertoire and perform with distinguished artists such as pianist Mitsuko Uchida and cellist Peter Wiley. He plans to return to Marlboro for a third season in 2025.
Pierre-Nicolas Colombat
Pianist Pierre-Nicolas Colombat’s musical activities include performance, research, writing, recording, and community organizing. He and his duo partner Vinicius Costa received prizes in both of the competitions in which they participated (Bollinger/Wigmore Hall Competition 2022 and IVC 2023). OperaWire praised his “tight partnership” and “brilliant programming” with soprano Meredith Wohlgemuth on the occasion of his Carnegie Hall debut in 2021. He regularly performs in international art song festivals and competitions (Hugo Wolf International Lied Competition, Renée Fleming’s Carnegie Hall Song Studio, LIEDBasel, Source Song Festival, Brigitte Fassbaender’s masterclasses with the International Hugo Wolf Akademie). In 2024, alongside his longtime friend Elias Dagher (with whom he also hosted the Boston Community Studio Class), he founded the Boston Text and Tone Festival which centers language as the common ground for performers of all levels and audiences to experience the rich expressive worlds that are created when text and music intertwine.
Pierre-Nicolas believes restructuring the distribution of and access to digitally released music is one of the greatest problems facing modern musicians. Efforts to address this have included limited circulation experiments (Across Artists Collaborative Collective, 2020-21), private collectable digit releases as well as subscription based research/writing (Wagner’s Nightmare Limited Digital album), and developing “guérilla streaming” practices with Henri Colombat (Sept fois cis, 2024). His writing on music includes his Doctoral Dissertation (Music and Modern Power: A performer’s tracing of virtuosity and systems of musical value, Boston University 2021), his Masterarbeit which includes a Marxist analysis of methods/media involved in the historical dissemination of music (Lied and the de-fetishization of music as a commodity, MAB 2023), further essays, and concert reviews for the Boston Music Intelligencer and Sinfonieorchester Basel.
His experience in opera began with collaborations with the Guerilla Opera company and rehearsal pianist engagements with Promenade Opera Company in Boston. He has also been on staff as pianist at Boston University and Boston Conservatory. Presently he continues his work as correpetiteur in productions with the Theatre Basel and the FHNW Musik Akademie Basel as well as other freelance work in Switzerland. He began his musical studies in Chicago (DePaul University, BM), continued in Boston (New England Conservatory, MM, and Boston University, DMA), and eventually moved to Basel, Switzerland (Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, Specialized Masters in Liedgestaltung) to pursue his love of languages and the vocal literature.