Nancy Carlin Associates: Morrongiello & Young

ChristopherMorrongiello
MarciaYoung
Elizabethan Lute Song

Morrongiello and Young

In the lute songs of the Elizabethan masters, music is at the service of poetry. This age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and Donne saw English verse rise to heights of expressivity still unsurpassed. To sing to the lute is an art barely separate from the art of declaiming verse. It requires clarity and beauty of tone, a natural flow of language, and a delicate sense of dialogue with the lute the instrument of courtly love. Morrongiello and Young bring to life the flower of Elizabethan music in their programs of lute songs, fantasias and instrumental dances for lute, voice, and renaissance harp.

Bio

Christopher Morrongiello

Chris, a former British Marshall Scholar, is a graduate of the Mannes College of Music, the Royal College of Music, and earned a PhD at Oxford. In 1996 the Marco Fodella Foundation awarded him a scholarship for studies at the Scuola Civica di Musica of Milan, and in 2006 the Lute Society of America chose him to give the first Patrick OBrien LSA Seminar Lectures.

An expert on Elizabethan and Jacobean music, Chris is preparing an edition of Daniel Bacheler's complete works for solo lute. His musical portrait of the Elizabethan muse and songstress Penelope Devereux, created for soprano Emily Van Evera (My Lady Rich, Avie 0045), has been greeted with much critical acclaim. Christopher directs the Bacheler Consort, plays tenor lute in the Venere Lute Quartet and teaches music history at Hofstra University.

Marcia Young

Marcia was cited by the Washington Post for her elegant, dark-hued soprano voice and winning mixture of formal restraint and emotional intensity. She is a member of My Lord Chamberlains Consort, Duo Marchand (with lutenist Andy Rutherford), and the medieval trio Trefoil.

In recent seasons Young has appeared with the viol consort Parthenia, the renaissance band Piffaro, and the Folger and Newberry Consorts; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, the Yale Center for British Art, the CityMusic Series in Columbus, the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, Amherst and Boston Early Music Festivals, the Ars Antiqua series in Chappaqua, New York, the HotShops gallery space in Omaha, and the Lute Society of America Seminar in Cleveland. Young has toured and recorded with Pomerium and Early Music New York, and has taught vocal and instrumental classes at the San Francisco Early Music Societys summer workshop.

During the academic year, Young serves as Director of Performance Studies at Stern College, Yeshiva University. Also a music journalist, she writes regularly for Opera News, Playbill, and Chamber Music America, and has been a classical radio host for WNYC-FM New York and Sirius-XM Radio.