Omri Shimron & Tim Hill in the music department perform a program also featuring the N.C. premier of "A Live Oak Growing" by Clint Borzoni.
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Tuesday, March 5
Tim Hill ’92, bass-baritone
Omri Shimron, piano
Whitley Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
Tim Hill ’91, an Elon alumnus now serving as a voice instructor in the university’s Department of Music and himself an accomplished bass-baritone singer, will join Associate Professor Omri Shimron (on the piano) for a 7:30 p.m. recital on Tuesday, March 5, in Whitley Auditorium. The duo will perform music by Mozart, Ibert and Brahms.
The second half of the recital features the North Carolina premiere of a new song cycle by young, up-and-coming American composer Clint Borzoni. His piece, “A Live Oak Growing,” uses texts by Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass).
In the fall of 2010, Hill created a Kickstarter campaign to fund the commission of four of the songs and the subsequent recording of the “A Live Oak Growing” CD.
The event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required.
More from Hill on the “A Live Oak Growing” website:
This project was conceived by me, after hearing a few of Clint’s song compositions. I was looking for American songs for a recital program. Most of the songs I found did not interest me in some way, others were either too high or too low, or too something else. I liked the way Clint’s songs had a large sweeping melody that allowed a classical singer’s voice to bloom and blossom throughout the phrase, much as one of the old masters. Yet, his music didn’t fall into the trap most young composers fall into…they weren’t copies of an old master’s style, they were Clint’s own unique voice and sounded new, fresh, and complex.
So, I approached Clint to write four songs. I ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds, and one of the rewards for donating was a recording of the completed songs. Clint suggested four texts from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. His idea for a set based on the theme of love and loss seemed interesting, so we moved ahead with the project.
During the composition phase, Clint was approached by baritone, Randal Turner to write three songs for a recital. Clint, once again, chose three poems from Leaves of Grass. Upon hearing them, I knew my project was going to expand to a full CD. I knew I had to sing these songs too–and why not record them?
About that time, I received the first draft of “I Saw in Louisiana” and Whitman’s themes of a live oak growing, alone and depending on one’s friends resonated with me. Thus the title of the CD came to me: A Live Oak Growing.