Featuring Holly Flack, Soprano

A thrilling vocal presence and commanding musicality have highlighted coloratura soprano Holly Flack as a versatile talent with a repertoire spanning centuries and styles. Praised as an “explosive talent” with her warm, flowing middle voice, rippling coloratura and effortless trills, she “wields an impressive range, effortlessly reaching higher than high notes” with her stratospheric vocal extension.

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Ms. Flack’s operatic engagements include the title role in Semele, Gilda in Rigoletto, Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte, Ophélie in Hamlet, Morgana in Alcina, Elvira in L'Italiana in Algeri, and the title role in Dinorah (Le Pardon de Ploërmel) for which she received a “Star- Making Performance” award from Mr. Fred Plotkin in his Seventh Annual “Freddie” Awards for Excellence in Opera, stating she, “sang the title role with astonishing fluidity and confidence... as if it was her birthright.”

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Internationally, Ms. Flack originated the role of Mollie the horse in the world premiere of Animal Farm by Alexander Raskatov with Dutch National Opera. She made her European debut at the Trentino Music Festival in Mezzano, Italy singing the role of the Vixen in The Cunning Little Vixen. She traveled regularly to China with the iSing! Festival for concerts in different cities around the country, and has performed on CCTV and other national networks for China’s National Day Celebration and the Chinese New Year. In 2022, she singularly represented the USA singing in a promotional video for the Beijing Winter Olympics.

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In orchestral concert, Ms. Flack has sung soprano soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s Magnificat, and Orff’s Carmina Burana, where she “delighted, flawlessly climbed to the extremes of her register, and continued with effortless coloratura”. In 2019, she performed the highest note ever sung at Lincoln Center, a B-flat above high C6, as a featured soloist in a Golden Night Concert celebrating China’s Mid-Autumn Festival at David Geffen Hall in New York City. In 2021, she surpassed this record singing a B natural above high C6 in the East/West: A Symphonic Celebration concert at David H. Koch Theater.

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Originally from Portland, Oregon, she holds a Bachelor's Degree in Vocal Performance from St. Olaf College, and a Master's Degree in Vocal Performance from the University of Kentucky.

Program Notes

Richard Wagner

Overture to Tannhäuser (Dresden Version)

Richard Wagner was not a modest man.

He believed he was reinventing music, reinventing opera, and quite possibly reinventing human consciousness. He was insufferable, financially reckless, personally disloyal, and held opinions about nearly everything with the force of divine revelation. He was also, infuriatingly, not entirely wrong about his own genius.

Tannhäuser was his breakthrough, the opera that announced to the world in 1845 that something new and dangerous had arrived. And its overture is a perfect map of everything the opera contains: pilgrimage and temptation, sacred and profane, the impossible human desire to have both at once.

The story is medieval, operatic, and gloriously excessive.

Tannhäuser is a knight and poet who has been living in the Venusberg, a mountain of supernatural pleasure presided over by Venus herself. He tears himself away, returns to the world of the living, and falls back in with his old companions and his devoted love, Elisabeth. But the pull of the Venusberg never leaves him. At a song contest he shocks everyone by singing openly of erotic love, is condemned by society, and sent on a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absolution from the Pope. The Pope's verdict: sooner would his papal staff sprout leaves than Tannhäuser be forgiven. The staff, as it turns out, sprouts leaves. But too late.

The overture tells this entire story without a word sung.

It opens with the Pilgrims' Chorus, solemn, slow, brass-heavy, the sound of genuine devotion moving through the world with purpose and weight. This is the sacred half of Tannhäuser's soul. The music fades into the distance like a procession disappearing over a hill.

And then the Venusberg music arrives.

Where the pilgrims were measured and dignified, this is restless and intoxicating. Strings shimmering, rhythms syncopating, the music coiling around itself with a kind of fevered energy that Wagner's contemporaries found frankly alarming. This is temptation rendered in sound, and Wagner makes it dangerously attractive. You understand immediately why Tannhäuser stayed as long as he did.

The overture builds to a shattering collision between these two worlds before the Pilgrims' Chorus returns, now in full blazing triumph:  trombones, full orchestra, the sacred theme no longer distant and humble but overwhelming and victorious.

Redemption wins. Just barely.

The Dresden version you are hearing tonight is Wagner's original, leaner, more concentrated than the Paris revision he made fifteen years later. There is something rawer about it, less polished, closer to the bone. You hear a young composer who has just figured out what he can do and is slightly terrified by it.

That terror, channeled into music, is exactly what makes it extraordinary.

A Showcase for the Soprano Three Showstoppers

Every art form has its moment of pure, undisguised showing-off.

In jazz it's the improvised solo. In ballet it's the 32 fouettés. In opera it's the coloratura soprano, a voice trained to do things that shouldn't be humanly possible, deployed by composers who took one look at what these singers could do and thought: more.

Tonight's soprano gives you three of the greatest such moments ever written. They are each, in their own way, completely unhinged. That is entirely the point.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Der Hölle Rache" from The Magic Flute

The Queen of the Night is one of opera's great villains, and this is her aria—two and a half minutes of barely controlled fury that climbs to a high F above the staff not once but four times, each one landing like a thrown dagger.

The Queen is furious at her daughter Pamina for refusing to murder the high priest Sarastro on her behalf. Her message is simple: kill him, or I disown you forever. Mozart sets this threat to music of such dazzling, crystalline ferocity that audiences have been simultaneously terrified and delighted for two hundred and thirty years.

The cruelty is in the coloratura, those cascading, machine-gun runs of notes that sound almost playful until you remember what the words are saying. Mozart understood something profound: the most frightening people are often the most brilliant ones.

Leonard Bernstein

"Glitter and Be Gay" from Candide

If Mozart's Queen is genuinely dangerous, Bernstein's Cunégonde is something even more subversive: a woman who knows exactly what she's doing and has decided to enjoy it anyway.

Candide, based on Voltaire's savage satirical novel, follows its relentlessly optimistic hero through a world determined to prove that this is emphatically not the best of all possible worlds. Cunégonde, his beloved, has fallen into a life of kept luxury after a series of catastrophes, and this aria is her elaborately guilty justification for the jewels, the furs, and the champagne. She knows it's wrong. She's keeping the diamonds.

Bernstein wrote it as a send-up of exactly this kind of operatic showpiece, and then, unable to help himself, wrote one of the greatest operatic showpieces ever composed. The soprano must be simultaneously comic and technically ferocious, self-mocking and genuinely dazzling. The high notes are real. The bad conscience is also real. The aria somehow makes both hilarious.

Jacques Offenbach

"Les oiseaux dans la charmille" (The Doll Song) from The Tales of Hoffmann

And then there is this: the most delicate trap in the soprano repertoire.

In Offenbach's fantastical opera, the poet Hoffmann falls in love with Olympia, who is, unknown to him, a mechanical doll. Her aria mimics the doll perfectly: sweet, precise, slightly too regular, the voice running in bright little decorated phrases before winding down mid-sentence whenever her spring needs cranking. The joke is visible to everyone except Hoffmann, which is of course what makes it devastating.

What looks simple is fiendishly difficult. The soprano must sound like a machine pretending to be human—the coloratura bright and clockwork-perfect, the occasional mechanical breakdown played completely straight. Too much acting and the comedy dies. Too little and it's just an exercise.

When it works, it's one of the most charming things opera has to offer: a piece of music laughing warmly at human gullibility, including our own.

Three arias. Three impossible voices. Three composers who knew exactly what they were asking for.

And exactly the right soprano to deliver them.

Georges Bizet

Selections from Carmen, Suites 1 & 2[TK1] 

When Carmen premiered in Paris in 1875, it was considered a scandal. A woman who does exactly as she pleases. A soldier who abandons his duty for her. A story that ends not in redemption but in a knife in the heart. The audience was deeply uncomfortable. The critics were appalled. Bizet died three months later, convinced he had failed.

Within a decade, Carmen was the most performed opera in the world. It has never stopped.

The story is almost brutally simple. Carmen is a cigarette factory worker in Seville, fiercely independent, magnetically attractive, answerable to no one. Don José is a soldier who falls catastrophically in love with her, abandons everything, and ultimately cannot accept that she has moved on. Escamillo is the glamorous bullfighter who replaces him. It ends badly, as these things do.

What makes it immortal is Carmen herself. She is one of the most fully realized characters in all of opera, not a villain, not a victim, just a woman who refuses to pretend to be something she isn't. Audiences in 1875 didn't know what to do with that. Audiences today recognize her immediately.

The five pieces you'll hear are drawn from orchestral suites assembled from Bizet's score — the opera distilled to its most vivid moments.

The Séguedille is Carmen at her most dangerous: flirtatious, quicksilver, irresistible. She sings it to Don José while under arrest, essentially seducing him into letting her escape. It works. The music is all lightness and spinning momentum—you understand completely why he never stood a chance.

Les Toreadors is the opera's great public face, the swaggering, brass-led march that opens the opera and introduces the world of the bullfight. It is Seville in carnival: loud, proud, and intoxicated with itself.

The Habanera is perhaps the most famous music Bizet ever wrote, and one of the most seductive melodies in existence. Its slow, syncopated rhythm is the musical embodiment of Carmen's philosophy: love is a wild bird, she sings, and it will not be tamed. The tune winds around itself like smoke, languid and inevitable. Bizet reportedly based it on a Cuban folk song he encountered in a songbook, never imagining it would define his legacy.

The Chanson du Toréador or the Toreador Song, is Escamillo's great entrance aria, and everything the Habanera is not: extroverted, chest-forward, built for a large man in a sequined jacket. It is opera doing exactly what opera does best, turning pure ego into something magnificent. Every baritone who has ever sung it has stood a little taller.

The Danse Bohème closes our selection with fire, a breathless, whirling dance from the smugglers' camp where Carmen and her companions live outside the law and outside convention. The rhythm accelerates, the orchestra spins, and for a few minutes you are entirely in their world: lawless, alive, and free.

Bizet never knew any of this would happen. He never knew his failure was actually a masterpiece, that the scandal would become a classic, that Carmen would outlast every one of her critics by a century and a half.

The audience in 1875 missed it. You won't.

Leonard Bernstein

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

In 1957, Leonard Bernstein did something that wasn't supposed to be possible.

He made a Broadway musical about juvenile gang violence in New York City, set it to a score that mixed jazz, Latin rhythm, and concert hall ambition, based it on Shakespeare's most heartbreaking play, and produced one of the most beloved works in American music. The critics argued about what it was, musical theater? opera? ballet? But audiences simply wept and went home humming.

The argument about what to call it has never been resolved. The music won anyway.

The story is Romeo and Juliet on the streets of Manhattan's Upper West Side. The Capulets are the Jets, a white street gang. The Montagues are the Sharks, Puerto Rican immigrants fighting for the same territory. Tony and Maria meet at a dance, fall instantly and completely in love, and are destroyed by a world that will not make room for them. Shakespeare knew this story. Bernstein knew this story. Every generation rediscovers it as if for the first time.

What Bernstein brought to it was a musical vocabulary unlike anything Broadway had heard. The rhythms are jagged and syncopated, constantly shifting, the musical equivalent of the city itself — restless, crowded, beautiful, dangerous. And underneath all of it, melody of such aching simplicity that it stops you cold.

The Symphonic Dances are Bernstein's own arrangement of the score's key moments, not a highlights reel but a carefully constructed arc that tells the whole story in thirty minutes without a word sung.

It opens with the Prologue: finger snaps in the darkness, then the Jets materializing out of silence, their theme angular and coiled, ready to spring. The tension is immediate and physical.

The Somewhere music arrives like a breath of open air, the great yearning theme that Tony and Maria sing of a place where they might simply exist without the world tearing them apart. In the Symphonic Dances it appears as an instrumental interlude, and stripped of its words it becomes even more nakedly beautiful. It is the emotional heart of everything.

The Mambo is the gangs facing each other across a dance floor, competitive energy barely containing something uglier underneath. Bernstein makes it thrilling and ominous simultaneously, you are dancing and you are watching a fuse burn.

Maria floats through briefly in Tony's love theme, simple and radiant, almost unbearably so, given what we know is coming.

The Cha-Cha captures the moment Tony and Maria first see each other, the world around them dissolving. The rhythm is gentle, almost dreamlike with two people in a crowded room suddenly alone.

Cool is the Jets trying to contain themselves, to stay controlled, the music a study in suppressed violence that keeps threatening to detonate.

The Rumble is where it all breaks open, the knife fight that kills both Bernardo and Riff, the point of no return. Bernstein writes it with terrifying momentum, the rhythms grinding against each other until something gives.

And then, after everything, the Finale. Somewhere, returning one last time. Not triumphant. Not consoling. Just present, like a hand held out in the dark.

Bernstein was 38 when West Side Story opened. He would spend the rest of his career, as conductor, educator, composer, and television personality, trying to convince the world that classical music and popular music were not enemies, that the concert hall and the street corner were drawing from the same human need. West Side Story was his proof of concept.

It remains, more than 60 years later, the most convincing argument he ever made.