As part of their Monday Concert Series, Elizabethtown College’s Fine and Performing Arts Department hosted a performance in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center on Oct. 20, with Dr. Anne Gross, assistant professor of music. Gross is a new professor at Etown. She teaches voice and offers private lessons, and she is a soprano herself. In addition, she also teaches diction. Besides being a singer, she also knows how to play piano, and when she was younger she played the viola and violin.
Her performance on Monday night consisted of a variety of songs written mostly in the Romantic era, which spanned from about 1820 to 1900, and the modern era. She began in French, with “Airs Chantés,” written by Francis Poulenc. She moved into Norwegian, performing several pieces written by Edvard Grieg. He is probably most recognizable today for his composition “In the Hall of the Mountain King;” he also helped develop a Norwegian style of music and a sense of nationalism to Norway.
At the halfway point of her performance, she switched to English, with a selection of songs written by Jake Heggie titled Eve-Song, which told the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden, spanning from the beginning until she was forced out of the garden after eating the fruit from the tree. Her next group of songs were written by Vítězslava Kaprálová, a Czech composer born in 1915 who was very notable at her time having even conducted the Czech Philharmonic. Gross had described her as being on par with Dvorak, another Czech composer who lived over 50 years prior. The final pieces for the night were in German, written by Joseph Marx, who became a musician against his family’s wishes. At the end, Gross included an unexpected encore singing goodbye to everyone, as well as performing a quick skit in which she claimed to be tone deaf, lightening up the mood with the sense of humor.
Gross said that a specialty of hers has been recital work and oratorios, and that she has done opera in the past. She gave some particularly inspiring words about performing in front of an audience: “I don’t find it very difficult, it’s not about me, it’s about communicating and conveying what the composer is trying to say to the audience.” She explained that she tries to give this advice to the classes she teaches because it could prove useful to remove the anxiety that can sprout from being on stage. While this concert will be Gross’ only performance for the year, there will still be more Monday Series concerts and many other concerts throughout the year featuring much of the other faculty and students of the Fine and Performing Arts Department.
