The Red Red Heart

Description

John Greer

The Red Red Heart

Five Songs to texts by
Marianne Bindig

John Greer’s lifelong devotion to the vocal repertoire is well chronicled in Canada. Both in the compositional roll of creator and as a recreator in his recital performances   Greer’s skill and complete commitment to the art is legendary. Inspired by texts of lifelong friend Canadian mezzo soprano Marianne Bindig, the embarrassment of riches that have informed the creation of this cycle may well brand these five songs as the inheritors of a kind of artistic insider trading; composed by an Art-Song specialist with text by a young poet who knows how words can be sung.

ISMN  M-706049-39-7

MARIANNE BINDIG – POET

Marianne has loved both word and song for as long as she can remember. Obvious to her as a child was the music inherent in language. The realization of beautiful text intuitively set to music is, to her, the perfect artistic marriage, the perfect sensual experience. She understands through the sound andfeeling of words as much as through their meaning
and context.

Her first collection of poems is entitled Working Women – My Mother’s Hands (1993) and all but one of the poems in The Red Red Heart are excerpted from this work. “Naked in the City Streets” appears in Marianne’s second volume, Love Poems – A Zealot in the Promised Land, completed in 2001. Many of the poems in this book were inspired by her time living on the island of Tenerife. Following this hopeful, often airy collection, came the more dense, darker Transformations and Revelations for Casually Sunlit Days (2005). Marianne is currently at work on her fourth book which so far includes very spare, distilled pieces.

To fill in all the time spent waiting for perfect metaphors to drop into her head from the ether, Marianne has carved out a wonderful career as a mezzo soprano, having appeared with all of Canada’s major opera companies and many fine orchestras and chamber groups in her capacity as a recitalist, concert, and oratorio singer. She has also sung with Florida Grand, Kentucky, Arizona and Cleveland Opera. Twice a Fellow at the Tanglewood Center for Music (Boston Symphony), she also spent four terms at the Banff Centre, and three terms at the Britten Pears School for Advanced Studies in Music. She is the recipient of a Chalmers Foundation Grant and holds three degrees from the University of Toronto, one of which is her recently acquired Bachelor of Education. She teaches voice privately from her home.

Marianne’s poems have also been set by eminent Canadian composer Harry Freedman (“Spanish Skies” for soprano and piano, 2003). Roots musician Ben Beveridge has set and recorded four of Marianne’s poems for Sandrock Label.

Marianne continues to sing for her supper and write for her soul.