Kissel and Harper continue Britten series Friday

Anne Kissel and tenor Joe Dan Harper present the penultimate performance of the song cycles Benjamin Britten composed for Peter Pears. The final performance of the song cycles will be presented on Friday, September 9 at 8 p.m. in Rosch and will include Who Are These Children, and On This Island.

Over the past ten years, tenor Joe Dan Harper and pianist Anne Kissel have performed in recital together throughout the United States and in Germany, in venues from Jordan Hall to the Gorki Theater in Berlin.

Hailed for his “magnificent purity of expression” (Fanfare Magazine) and “stirring delivery” (Boston Globe), tenor Joe Dan Harper is a versatile and engaging interpreter of a wide-ranging repertoire from Schubert to Britten. Mr. Harper has performed with such renowned groups as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, Boston Academy of Music, Central City Opera, Handel & Haydn Society, South Carolina Opera, Utah Festival Opera and Utah Opera, and has been heard in such venues as Boston’s Jordan Hall, Berlin’s Gorki Theater, at SongFest in Malibu, California, at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

Harper has premiered works by some of America’s most prominent composers, including Thea Musgrave, Stephen Paulus, Daniel Pinkham, Libby Larsen, Ned Rorem, and Lior Navok, and in 2009 performed at the soundSCAPE new music festival in Pavia, Italy. A passionate interpreter of song repertoire with a noted gift for expressive and poetic diction, his discography includes Florestan Recital Project’s recently released “The Complete Songs of Daniel Pinkham, volumes 1 and 2,” Daniel Pinkham’s opera The Garden Party in the role of “Adam” on the Arsis label, Wesley Fuller’s setting of five poems by William Carlos Williams, A Solace of Ripe Plums, released on Capstone Records, and Music of Randol Bass, with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus.

In 2003, Harper was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany where he studied German Lieder and opera with Rudolf Piernay and Ulrich Eisenlohr. Harper has been a Fellow at the Steans Institute for Young Artists at the Ravinia Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center. He holds degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Southern Methodist University.

Mr. Harper performs frequently with his wife, pianist Anne Kissel. Highly regarded as interpreters of contemporary music, the Kissel-Harper duo has premiered works by numerous composers including Daniel Pinkham, Ned Rorem, Libby Larsen, and Stephen Paulus.

Over the past ten years, they have performed at a wide variety of venues throughout the United States and in Germany, and have been featured on National Public Radio (WGBH Boston) Live Performances with Richard Knisely. The duo are Co-Founders and have served as Artistic Co-Directors of the Boston based Florestan Recital Project, with whom they recently completed a prestigious three-year residency at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Praised by the Boston Globe for her “subtlety and insight,” pianist Anne Kissel is sought after as a chamber musician and song recitalist. Kissel has been a member of Boston’s Radius Ensemble, has performed with Opera Boston’s contemporary opera festival Opera Unlimited, and has been heard in venues such as Jordan Hall, Rochester’s Women in Music Festival, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, Boston’s Goethe Institute, and at the Gorki Theater, Berlin. She can be heard performing works of Daniel Pinkham on the Arsis label, and on the first volume of The Complete Songs of Daniel Pinkham, recently released by Florestan Records and hailed by NPR as one of the top five contemporary classical CD’s of 2010.

Kissel received her Doctorate in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music from the Eastman School of Music where she was honored with the C. Eschenbach Award and the Excellence in Accompanying Award. With support from Eastman, Kissel travelled to the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh, England in 2009 where she studied Benjamin Britten’s song manuscripts, scores, and letters.

Under the auspices of a Fulbright Fellowship, she has studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Stuttgart, Germany. As a solo pianist, Kissel received her Master’s degree from Indiana University and her Bachelor of Music degree as a Foundation Fellow at the University of Georgia in her hometown of Athens. Her teachers have included Jean Barr, Randall Hodgkinson, Evelyne Brancart, André Marchand, and Richard Zimdars.