Susan Graham Performs A Standing Witness

In 2018 composer Richard Danielpour approached poet Rita Dove, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, about writing a song cycle for Susan Graham, hailed by Gramophone as “America’s favorite mezzo.” Danielpour had in mind an evening-length work for chamber ensemble and mezzo-soprano, with lyrics based on poems, essentially testimonies, of a female figure who has witnessed all the highs and lows of America over the past 50 years or so. Dove began musing on what this witness might have experienced, drafting 12 poems, plus prologue and epilogue, reflecting upon major milestones—from Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy through Watergate, the AIDS epidemic, tech breakthroughs of the 1990s, and the Gulf Wars. A wordless instrumental elegy relates to 9/11, and A Standing Witness ends with songs reflecting on the watershed year of 2020, when it was composed, along with a reveal of the standing witness’s identity. Danielpour considers that this musical document, “both historical and artistic in nature, has been created in order to ask two questions: where have we come from as Americans, and where are we going?” OSL performs the New York Premiere of a work of “songs America needs to hear” (Opera News), and “powerful, serious, and important poems . . . The music is gorgeous.” (Musical America)