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AMHERST, Mass.--Peter W. Shea, a local tenor, will present "From Schubert to Weill: A Concert of German Lieder," on Thursday, April 26, at 4 p.m. in Porter House at Amherst College (next to the Lord Jeffery Inn). Gregory Hayes will accompany Shea on piano. The Amherst College Department of German and the German House are sponsors of the concert, which is free and open to the public.
In the first half of the program, Shea will present songs written by German poets J. W. Goethe and Heinrich Heine and composed by Franz Schubert (1808-78). He will sing settings by Kurt Weill (1900-50) and Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) of works by Goethe, Heine and Bertolt Brecht in the second half. These will include some familiar Brecht-Weill collaborations from the "Dreigroschenoper" and some works Weill and Eisler composed in their exile in Hollywood during the Second World War.
Peter W. Shea, a frequent tenor soloist with groups such as the Arcadia Players Baroque Orchestra, the Hampshire Choral Society and the Brattleboro Community Chorus, has sung professionally since 1972. He is a member of Singers' Project, a newly formed professional chorus. He studied voice at the Hartt School in West Hartford and historical musicology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Shea is a cataloger of Germanic languages and musical materials for the University Libraries at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is developing "Ihr Lieder! Ihr meine guten Lieder!," a Web-based performer's guide to musical settings of Heine's poetry (http://www.library.umass.edu/subject/music/heine).
Pianist Gregory Hayes, a 1973 graduate of Amherst College who also studied at the Manhattan School of Music, has taught at Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and is a senior lecturer at Dartmouth. In past seasons his harpsichord and piano performances have been heard regularly in New York and New England, with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the New England Bach Festival, the Mohawk Trail Concerts Series and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. He is director of music for the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence, and conducts the Da Camera Singers. The author of numerous reviews, articles and liner notes for recordings, Hayes is on the faculty of the Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Mass.
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