Lovers of vocal music are in for a genuine treat this weekend. Internationally acclaimed opera star and recitalist Laura Aikin returns to town for a pair of concerts in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall on the UB Amherst campus. Aikin, a Buffalo area native, is a Clarence High School graduate who received her BFA in Music Education from the University at Buffalo. At 3pm on Sunday, October 14, Aikin will perform a song recital along with Donald Sulzen, her long-time piano accompanist. On Wednesday, October 17, at 8pm, the Slee Sinfonietta will present a challenging program, the second half of which will feature Aikin as soloist in three movements from modernist composer Pierre Boulez’ monumental work Pli selon pli. In addition, Aikin will present a master class for UB vocal students at 10am on Thursday, October 18, on the Lippes Concert Hall stage. The master class is open to the public for observation, free of charge.

Aikin is in the midst of the most distinguished singing career of any UB vocal studies graduate. With her vocal range of over three octaves and dynamic stage presence, Aikin has developed a truly international career. In the US, she has appeared with many leading opera companies, such as the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Santa Fe Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera. Aikin began her career as a member of the company of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. There she sang more than 300 times in such leading roles as Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos), Sophie (Rosenkavalier), Adele (Die Fledermaus), Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflote) and in the title role in Alban Berg’s Lulu. Her portrayal of the doomed seductress Lulu at Operhaus Zurich has been released on a DVD that has met with universal acclaim. Other European appearances include La Scala in Milan, the Bastille in Paris and the Vienna State Opera.

Aikin is equally at home on the concert hall stage and in the recital hall as on the opera hall stage. In addition to singing with most of the major orchestras in both Europe and America, Aikin has recently appeared in the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Years Eve Concert under the baton of Simon Rattle, and in Rome at a command performance for Pope Benedict celebrating the first anniversary of his papacy, in a concert that was telecast worldwide.

Aikin plays the title role in "Lulu."

On the recital stage, Aikin has appeared as a lied singer in Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome and last April in San Francisco, where she sang the same program of song cycles by Richard Strauss and Ned Rorem that she will offer this Sunday afternoon. Strauss’ Eight Poems by Hermann Gilm, Op. 10 features understated music and romantic era imagery, with a successful performance relying upon the dramatic skills of the interpreter. The Five Little Songs, Op. 69, also by Strauss, are settings of poems by Heinrich Heine and Achim von Arnim that often rely on subtle, ironic images for effect. A reviewer of the San Francisco performance wrote that while she “never wasted an opportunity to exploit the sheer musicality of Strauss’ vocal writing—as when she effortlessly slid from chest voice to head voice at select moments—Aikin was not intent on merely singing; rather, she was communicating, even conversing with her listeners.”

In the final selection on Sunday afternoon, cellist Natasha Farny will join Aikin and Sulzen for a performance of Ned Rorem’s song cycle Last Poems of Wallace Stevens. Born in 1923, the prolific Rorem, considered by some the dean of American classical song composers, provides yet another Buffalo connection. In an interview last year, Rorem recollected how he had been invited to Buffalo decades ago to deliver six lectures followed by concerts. He replied that he did not “know anything about music except how to write it.” Yet Rorem accepted the invitation because it forced him to think about how he composed, with the result that he felt he “became a very excellent teacher.” In Last Poems soprano, piano and cello appear in many different combinations of importance in “nine sections which contrast strongly in timbre, time signature, tempo and rhythm,” with the cello sometimes echoing the singer and at other times providing its own musical commentary. Aikin and Sulzen recorded this work for the Orfeo label in 2003 as a selection on a widely praised CD of Rorem’s vocal music.

On Wednesday, October 17 at 8pm, Aikin will appear with UB’s professional chamber orchestra, the Slee Sinfonietta, under the baton of its conductor James Baker. This event has an added significance, as it will mark the official naming of one of UB’s distinguished Centers of Excellence as the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music. According to the press release, “As principal donors for The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, Bob and Carol’s generous support will enhance UB’s renowned tradition of composition, production and performance of innovative contemporary music, enabling the University to take its place among the very few American institutions that are committed to creating and performing contemporary music.”

Aikin plays the title role in "Lulu."

Aikin will be the vocal soloist in three movements from Pierre Boulez’s much revised work Pli selon pli. Rarely offered in live performance, due as much to the demands that it places on the performers as well as to the elaborate forces required, the piece did not reach its definitive shape until 1989, several decades after Boulez began composition. According to musicologist Paul Griffiths, Boulez scored two of the movements, Improvisations sur Mallarme I & II, “for soprano with a percussion ensemble emphasizing tuned and metal instruments, appropriate to the white, bright scintillant imagery of the poems” by Mallarme. Tombeau, the third movement, “rolls on like a rock, gathering onto and into itself musical ensembles and materials, speeding up, complexifying itself, until at last, in a magnificent reinvention of the final cadence, it conjures up words, the voice and an obbligato horn,” providing what should be an appropriate finale to a welcome return home for Buffalo’s own opera star.

The first half of Wednesday evening’s performance will include three works by David Felder, UB professor of composition and director of the Center for 21st Century Music. In Chashmal, or “speaking silence,” the raw sonic materials of the sound of the bass voice are meditatively processed onto a landscape of elemental sounds. Sa’arah, or “stormy wind,” a work in progress receiving its area premiere, continues the meditative state of Chasmal. Bass Nicholas Isherwood, who gave a dramatically convincing performance of Chasmal during last summer’s June in Buffalo Festival, returns as the soloist in the two works, which also feature the video projections of Elliot Caplan. Written for six flutists who also double other flutes, Dionysiacs features gli altri, or “the others,” a group of instrumentalists placed antiphonally within and around the performance space.

Visit slee.buffalo.edu for more information.

Question: How can you be in two places at the same time? Unfortunately, you already know the answer. If you cannot make it to Laura Aikin’s Sunday afternoon recital at Slee Hall, perhaps you may be able to hear the young mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke at 3pm in the Mary Seaton Room of Kleinhans Music Hall. Ms. Cooke is appearing there on the Buffalo Chamber Music Society’s free, Gift to the Community program.

Visit bflochambermusic.org for more information.