Maryse Carlin & Todd Decker, Harpsichords

Co-Sponsor: Danforth University Center - Chamber Series
 
Sonata in F Major                                                           Wilhelm Friedeman Bach (1710-1784)
Allegro e moderato
Andante
Presto
 
Concerto #2 in A Minor                                                     Antonio Soler (1729-1783)
Andante-Allegro  
                                                                                    
Suite in G                                                                       Gaspard le Roux (1660-1707)
Allemande-Courante-Sarabande-Menuet-Passepied-Gigue  
 
Concerto in C Major WV 1061                                          Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Allegro-Adagio-Fuga
 

Maryse Carlin has performed throughout the United States and abroad, both as a pianist and harpsichordist. She made her harpsichord debut recital at Carnegie Recital  Hall in New York under the auspices of Jeunesses Musicales. Since then, she has appeared at the Whitney Museum in New York, in Jordan Hall and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Isabella Gardner Museum under the auspices of the Westfield Center for Early Keyboard Studies, and as guest artist with the Boston Musica Viva, Fromm Foundation Concerts at Harvard University, and the Marlboro Festival Music.

As soloist with orchestra, she has collaborated with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, , Roger Norrington, Nicholas McGegan,  Raymond Leppard  and José-Luis Garcia. In 1992 she performed as fortepianist on the "Great Performers at Lincoln Center: Mozart Marathon at Alice Tully Hall." Her performance of the "Goldberg Variations" in Saint Louis was proclaimed one of the most memorable performances of the year by the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. Maryse Carlin has appeared on French Television and on radio stations such as WGBH and WBUR in Boston, WQXR in New York, as well as on public television in Saint Louis. Recent concert appearances have taken her to France, Austria, Switzerland and Germany and Italy.

Maryse Carlin lives in Saint Louis, where she directs the Kingsbury Ensemble, one of the premiere early music groups in the midwest. She is the founder of the "Festival de Musique Ancienne" in Saint Savin, France .

She has recorded music of Rameau and Forqueray on the harpsichord, as well as Schubert four hands works with Seth Carlin on the Naiad label, and lately a CD of Italian cantatas and sonatas with the Kingsbury Ensemble.

Review excerpts:

"Her use of register coloration was subtly effective. Five sonatas by Scarlatti (were) dispatched with an enlivening flair."

            NEW YORK TIMES

"Maryse Carlin was impressive...The sound she drew was warm and flowing ; she knew how to sustain sonorities with a slight rolling of chords and a close-to-the-keyboard touch. Her changes of registration were judiciously applied for dynamic variety."

"One of the most admirable qualities of her playing is an ability to sustain long lines, to give an eloquent focus to phrases."

            SAINT LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Todd Decker has published three books on commercial popular music in the United States from the 1920s to the present (Broadway, Hollywood film and television, the recorded music industry, and jazz).

  • Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (University of California Press, 2011) received the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Music Makes Me locates Fred Astaire’s film and television career in the histories of popular song and jazz and explores Astaire’s dances accompanied by African American musicians in the segregated world of the film musical.
  • Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses extensive archival research to consider how performers—both black and white—shaped this landmark work in its original 1927 Broadway version and in subsequent versions produced in New York, London, and Hollywood.
  • Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River”?: The Lives of an American Song (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2014) traces the performance history of this very well-known song across eight decades and a wide array of genres—jazz to rock, opera to gospel, doo wop to reggae—with an ear to how the history of race relations in the U.S. has played out in the realm of popular music.

His current book project, Hymns for the Fallen: Combat Movie Music and Sound after Vietnam (under contract with University of California Press) examines how a signal Hollywood film genre—the war film—deployed music and sound in the creation of narrative feature films centered on the experience of American soldiers on foreign battlefields after the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Prof. Decker received his Ph.D. in historical musicology at the University of Michigan in 2007 and was selected for an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship by the American Musicological Society in 2006-07. He joined the faculty of Washington University in fall 2007—after a one-year visiting professor position at UCLA—and teaches courses on twentieth-century American popular music, film music, and eighteenth-century European art music. He has given numerous scholarly presentations nationally and internationally, including at the Library of Congress, the University of Texas at Austin, and Northwestern University.

Outside his work on American music, Prof. Decker has published articles on eighteenth-century keyboard composer Domenico Scarlatti and holds a Master of Music in harpsichord performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has many years of experience performing on harpsichord, piano, and organ, as well as conducting, directing, choreographing, and performing musical theatre. He frequently accompanies his wife, soprano Kelly Daniel-Decker, in cabaret shows of classic American popular songs.