Biography

Born in Repentigny, Quebec to parents who were both professional opera singers, soprano Karina Gauvin has been called “the incarnation of a Cleopatra through songs with haunting modulations” (Diapason). At the age of eight she was already singing in the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus. Her repertory spans three centuries, but she is known above all for her striking interpretations of characters in 18th-century operas and oratorios by Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, and others. Whether performing with period instrument ensembles like the Akademie für alte Musik Berlin, Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Quebec’s Violons du Roy, or with modern orchestras like the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony, Gauvin is adept at riveting an audience. Her voice “is like a clear, refreshing and inexhaustible spring that darts and sparkles around any ornamental obstacle in its way,” wrote Opera News. Her extensive discography focuses on Baroque repertory, but she is also renowned for Mahler, Debussy and Barber. In 2017 Gauvin was named an Honorary Director of the Art Song Foundation of Canada. From 2020 to 2025 she was Mécénat Musica Artist-in-Residence. Her artistic partner of many years, pianist Michael McMahon, is renowned as one of Canada’s premier accompanists. 5th LMMC appearance.

http://karinagauvin.com/en/home/

Notes

The art song (la mélodie, as opposed to the more popular, folklike chanson) took hold in France in the mid-nineteenth century. A sensitivity to fine contemporary poetry, a high level of melodic inspiration, and a marriage of poetic sentiment to musical expression characterized the best of this large repertory. Nearly every important French composer of the century contributed to the genre. “You will find sobriety and sadness in French music, as in German or Russian music, wrote Francis Poulenc.” But the French have a finer sense of proportion. We realize that somberness and good humor are not mutually exclusive. French composers, too, write profound music; but when they do, it is leavened with that lightness of spirit without which life would be unendurable.” With this in mind, let us turn to today’s recital that opens and closes with music by French composers.

Reynaldo Hahn was born in Caracas, but from the age of three lived in France. Many of Hahn’s songs are delicate miniatures imbued with elegance and good taste. Graham Johnson, captures the essence and appeal of this oeuvre when he writes: “Hahn’s music evokes a Paris, indeed a way of life, forever gone and, like Proust’s world, retrievable only at special moments where taste, sight, or the sound of a musical phrase provoke the memory, or even perhaps the collective unconscious.”

More than half of Gustav Mahler’s 42 songs use as their texts folk poetry published in the early nineteenth-century under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). The five songs we hear this afternoon testify to the great diversity of subject matter that engaged Mahler, from playful voices of childhood to complicated love affairs, from the distress of a soldier to tragic cries of the famished.

Few composers have captured in music the spirit and essence of their homeland with the vividness and poignancy as has Benjamin Britten. One of the many manifestations of Britten’s “English-ness” is found in settings of his country’s folksongs.

 Cécile Chaminade wrote her first pieces at the age of eight and went on to produce a large catalogue of nearly 400 works. The majority are salon-style pieces for piano, many of which achieved great popularity in her day. The nine light-hearted, sentimental, charming songs Karina Gauvin has chosen were mostly composed in the early 1890s, when the composer was at the height of her fame.

Robert Markow