Katherine Bergeron, voice
Katherine Bergeron has taught on the faculties of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tufts University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She joined the Brown faculty in 2004 and now serves as the Dean of the College. She is author of Decadent Enchantments (University of California Press, 1998), and editor of Disciplining Music (University of Chicago Press, 1992). In 2004 she edited a special issue on Music, Rhythm, and Language for the journal Representations.
Bergeron's teaching and research have been animated by performance. A student of Lillian Loran, she began working on French songs in preparation for her book on the mélodie. She is a singer of eclectic tastes, having also performed Gregorian chant, the blues, the court music of central Java, contemporary pop music, and the experimental idioms of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Dana Gooley, piano
Dana Gooley studied piano at New England Conservatory and English at Wesleyan University before completing his Ph.D. in musicology at Princeton University in 1999. He has taught at Harvard University, Amherst, and Case Western Reserve, and joined the Brown University faculty in 2006.
His research, which combines criticism and performance, has focused on the cult of the virtuoso, the role of the music critic, and the place of charisma in the 19th-century European public sphere. He is author of The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor of Franz Liszt and His World (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is currently completing a book on improvisational practices of the 19th century. An active jazz pianist, Gooley also writes about jazz history, and is engaged in a study of jazz-pop crossovers in the 1950s.
About the recording
Katherine Bergeron and Dana Gooley, colleagues in Brown University's Department of Music, prepared Fauré's song cycle for a concert performance in October 2008 and completed this recording in June 2009. The recording was made in Grant Recital Hall on the Brown University campus. James Moses and Butch Rovan were the sound engineers. Our thanks go to Jim and Butch, and also to our colleague Fred Jodry, director of Brown's voice program, who sang with us on the October recital.
Texts and translations of the ten songs are available on the Oxford University Press website, as well as on the full-resolution CD, available for purchase.
