NWC to host guest vocal and piano recital

Northwestern College will host a duo-recital featuring baritone vocalist Stephen Swanson and pianist David Gompper on Thursday, Oct. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in Christ Chapel. The concert is free and open to the public.

Swanson has toured North America and Europe extensively and has sung numerous solos in many opera houses, including in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. He earned degrees from North Park College and Northwestern University and completed an American Guild of Musical Artists apprenticeship with the Wolf Trap Company. Swanson also fulfilled an internship at the International Opera Studio of the Zurich Opera. He has served as a professor of voice at the University of Iowa since 1994.

Gompper has been professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa since 1991. A pianist, conductor and composer, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London, taught in Nigeria and earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan. He was on the faculty at the University of Texas, Arlington, before coming to Iowa. He spent 2002–03 in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory.

Gompper’s compositions are heard throughout the United States and Europe. His works have premiered at New York’s Carnegie Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Sue De Haan will be performing on the flute and piccolo for several numbers throughout the concert. De Haan, a flute instructor for Northwestern, also is the assistant band director for the Sioux Center Middle School and gives private lessons at her home studio for high school flute and saxophone students. A member of the Northwest Iowa Symphony Orchestra, she earned a Master of Music degree in flute performance from the University of South Dakota and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa.  

The recital, entitled “Was My Brother in the Battle?” will be comprised of a series of songs of war, including the title song by Stephen Foster and Battle Hymn of the Republic by William Steffe. Other works to be performed include Charles Ives’s Three Songs of the War, Voices from World War II by Gene Scheer, Tom Lehrer’s So Long, Mom and The Wild West is Where I Want to Be, and Bob Dylan’s Masters of War. The concert will conclude with Gompper’s Mrs. Bixby’s Sons.