Joan
Heller, Senior Lecturer, formerly Associate Professor
of Music
Head of the Voice Department, Division
of Music
Meadows School of Arts, Southern Methodist University
email: jheller@smu.edu
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- Performance Reviews:
Avant-garde
music has gotten short shrift in recent Voices seasons. But
"Utterances," composed between 1977 and 1995 by Boston-based Robert
Cogan (b. 1930) redressed the balance. This is a "folio" of mixed texts
and music that can be combined at the performer's pleasure. Soprano
Joan Heller put on a virtuoso display of vocalism, including wide
leaps, high squeals and glissandos.
Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning
News, 1 May 2006
Robert Cogan’s
Utterances required solo soprano Joan Heller to parade through a cast
of personalities, changing moods every few bars. Heller met this
challenge with incredible versatility, singing operatically, buzzing,
trilling, clucking and clicking, exploring every inch of her dynamic,
pitch, and emotional range.
Gail Wein, The Washington Post,
8 November 2005
Of the singers, Joan Heller exhibited
flexible technique, a refined
sound, and well-executed diction in the pair of Cogan works (intrepidly
backed by pianist Jon Sakata in the Celan Cycle)…
David Cleary, The New Music Connoisseur,
Spring/Summer 2005
Blessed with an incredible
technique, dead-on
pitch and an apparently limitless upper range, Heller easily proved
herself
the Cathy Berberian of the '90s.
John von
Rhein, Chicago
Tribune,
24 April 1994
Heller's performance, a veritable
tour
de force, was so spellbinding and charged that it became impossible -
for
this listener, at least - to move or breathe.
Dimitri
Drobatschewsky, The
Arizona
Republic, 4 March 1992
Joan Heller has a bright and
wide-ranged
soprano voice. She is a musician of extraordinary culture, ideal taste
and is clear and responsive to the surprises of avant-garde music
intonations.
... She managed to reach to the soul of Bunin's poetry, understand the
essential Russian music, treat it in her own way and give music new and
non-traditional meaning. This perhaps is the main idea of interaction
of
two cultures.
G.
Soboleva, Evening Moscow
News,
16 October 1990
But Heller turned the piece into a
dramatic
comedy. Seated at a desk, interfacing with her computer, entering info
into the keyboard and jabbering on the phone, she made the sky-diving
vocal
lines, the rapid-fire nonsense, the high-pitched bleeps and bloops, the
ah-ha laughs and sundry vocal tricks Berio calls for seem the everyday
talk of high tech life.
Anthony
Tommasini, The Boston
Globe,
15 November 1990
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