Aperio continues its gallery recital series with Gilded Twilight – Poetic Evocations of America’s Victorian Age.  This program contrasts perspectives on the Victorian era in the United States through the songs of Amy Beach, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. 

The music of Amy Beach embodies the Victorian ideal  - refined, genuine, polite, repressed but passionate. Charles Ives’ songs employ poetry that looks back on the Victorian age with equal parts wistfulness and irony. Aaron Copland’s vocal setting of 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson captures the ruminations and intimate fantasies of the beloved Victorian era poet and is widely considered a modern masterpiece of vocal repertoire.  Taken as a whole, these works chart the transition from European romantic ideals toward a distinctly American aesthetic – one that is conveyed through poetry, song, and chamber music.