INTERVIEW: New recording by Susan Narucki addresses gun violence in the United States
Image courtesy of artist / Provided by Kathryn King Media with permission.
Throughout Susan Narucki’s illustrious musical career, which dates back to her debut at the Ojai Festival in 1986, she has constantly tackled challenging projects and compositions. As an award-winning soprano, she has worked with a variety of noted orchestras, composers and chamber ensembles, and her most recent project, which focuses on gun violence in the United States, is one of her most meaningful.
Inheritance, which premiered in October 2018, features Narucki in the role of Sarah Winchester, a woman who married into the famous Winchester repeating rifle family. In the one-act opera, Narucki intricately sings the protagonist role, weaving her voice through Lei Liang’s composition and Matt Donovan’s libretto. She is joined by Mexican baritone Josué Cerón and sopranos Hillary Jean Young and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. Luckily the performance was captured by Albany Records, and the company recently released Inheritance as an album.
“It was really so great to be part of that project,” Narucki said in a recent phone interview. “It’s wonderful that the recording has been able to come out during the time when things are kind of slow in our industry, so it’s nice to have that come out.”
Narucki helped kickstart this project because Liang and she are colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, in the music department. They had worked together on another chamber opera that also addresses social issues, so they decided to collaborate again.
“That [first project] was Cuatro Corridos,” she said. “That was a project that I commissioned and produced in 2013, and that was about the trafficking of women across the U.S.-Mexico border, a really interesting project in that it brought together creative artists from both sides of the border. So the librettist and two of the composers on the piece were from Mexico, and two American-based composers were on the rest of the team. There were actually four composers in the piece, each setting a one-person story. So Lei and I worked together on that project, and that project was very well received. And I really enjoyed working with him, and so we talked about what it would be like to create a project just with the two of us working together with finding a new team and really taking the time to address another subject that we found important through music. And that’s how we started to work on Inheritance together.”
Listening to the Albany Records recording amazes Narucki because of how well they were able to capture the sound from that performance, in particular how the producer, Judy Sherman, was able to focus on every little detail of the performance.
“It’s a beautiful piece that Lei has created, really evocative, but there’s so much nuance in it and so much color from the voices and from the ensemble,” Narucki said. “It was amazing to me that she was able to able to capture so much of that detail because, of course, when you’re in a room performing you hear it, but a lot of that stuff doesn’t necessarily get transferred to the disc.”
Throughout Narucki’s career, she has performed the works of many different composers. There was a time when she was focused on older music, especially songs and compositions from the early 20th century. Lately, though, she has gravitated toward working with modern composers and taking new risks.
“I really want to focus on music that speaks to me … because it’s written by people that I love whose music I cherish, bringing attention to things in our world that people need to see, people need to highlight,” she said. “There’s no shortage of that going on these days, and that’s been something that I’ve been interested in the past 10 years and really starting to produce and being a driving force in creating these projects that hopefully contribute something else to the repertoire. That’s what I’m doing these days.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Inheritance, featuring Susan Narucki, is now available from Albany Records. Click here for more information.
