Soprano Rebecca Kellerman and accompanist/husband Jeremy Filsell (piano, organ) perform art songs composed by Ernest Moeran (1894-1950), Francis Pott (1957- ), Louis Vierne (1870-1973), Jeremy Filsell (1964- ), Marcel Dupré (1886-1971), and Leo Popplewell (1995- ). The performers are married and both work at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York: Kellerman as Music Associate for Children and Youth as well as Concerts and Media Coordinator; Filsell as Organist and Director of Music. A native Pennsylvanian and before her move to New York City in 2019, Rebecca Kellerman pursued performance and teaching in Washington, DC, for two decades. Recording sessions occurred in the fine acoustics of The Church of Latter-day Saints of Spencerville, Maryland. The church, its 4-manual M. P. Möller organ of 69 ranks, op. 11806, 1990, and its Steinway D piano were severely damaged in a fire of November 20, 2023.

Nothing Gold can stay (Robert Frost)

This collection of songs embraces an Anglo-French entente cordiale and represents repertoire which has formed the core of Rebecca Kellerman’s recital work over a number of years. Investigating the highways and byways of the repertoire has always been at the heart of Rebecca’s interpretative interests, and her collaboration with pianist Jeremy Filsell has yielded many recitals reflecting such repertoire.

Ernest Moeran’s music is much neglected, yet his orchestral and chamber music is, at its finest, on a creative and dramatic par with his more illustrious, and better-­known contemporary, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Yet, as with so many early 20th-century English composers, the intimacy of the song and the solo delivery of either rustic or romantic text grants access to the heart of the composer’s expression. Moeran had been a student of Stanford at the RCM, and during the post-war period, he, like Vaughan Williams, collected folk tunes from rustic locations, and rural pubs in Norfolk and its environs. Interest in his own Irish also roots led him to spend increasing time in Kenmare, County Kerry, where he became a well-known and popular figure. The peace he found in rural Ireland inspired him to return, in 1934, to a long-abandoned symphony (finally completed in 1937), and during his fruitful years in Ireland, he wrote a Violin Concerto (1937–41), three shamefully neglected orchestral Rhapsodies (one in F-sharp for piano and orchestra), all of which deserve greater championship. In December 1950, during a heavy winter storm, Moeran left his cottage and walked along the Kenmare pier, where he fell into the water. His body was later retrieved, and while at first it was thought he had drowned, medical evidence indicated that he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The songs here perhaps represent Moeran’s expression distilled to a musical essence.

Towards the 21st century, other effective English language-setters include Francis Pott, one of the finest composers of his generation. Pott’s musical veracity stems from his early training as a chorister at New College, before his holding music scholar­ships at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. For much of his professional life, he was professor of Composition at the London College of Music (University of West London), and he received many awards as a composer, including in 1997, the first prize in the S. S. Prokofiev International Composing Competition in Moscow. In 2020 he was the recipient of the Medal of the Royal College of Organists in recognition of distinguished achievement as a composer of organ and sacred choral music. The two songs heard here represent Pott’s considerable interests in English poetry. How many times was written in 1978 (at the age of 21), and represents telling youthful intensity and perhaps unfettered exuberance. Along with A Dirge (written in 2016) these songs bookend a published group of a four-song cycle forming a narrative around declarations of love, alienation and regret.

Leo Popplewell is an emergent chamber musician (cello) of the highest order, and a founding member of the Mithras Trio. Together, the trio has garnered plaudits, and international recognition, after winning first prize at the 10th Trond­heim International Chamber Music Competition (2019). They were also first prize winners at the 67th Royal Over-Seas League Annual Music Competition, and selected as Kirckman Concert Society Young Artists for the 2019/2020 season. Leo read music at Clare College, Cambridge, before completing studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His writing represents cosmopolitan musical interests, but a partiality for the writing of American poet Robert Frost. In these songs, the poet captures a brief moment of wonder and mis­per­cep­tion, with metaphors comparing love and elements of the natural world, and in the third song, a sense of impermanence and temporality which makes the fleeting things that fade beautiful.

With a foot in both England and France, Jeremy Filsell’s French text settings reflect both his own gallic ancestry, and his well-regarded researches and performances of 20th-century French music. The four mélodies here represent respectful homages to Fauré, Poulenc, Michel Legrand and then Rachmaninov (for the fourth song represents a loose paraphrase of the central movement of Rachmaninov’s beloved 1st Piano Concerto), in poetry dealing with loss, remembrance and the expression of intense love.

As composers of organ music, Louis Vierne and Marcel Dupré may seem obvious musical bedfellows; yet, in life, la grande rupture between these two eminent Parisian musicians in the early 1920s remained sadly unhealed at Vierne’s death. They were, together, arguably the foremost French organists of the 20th century. Vierne was a prolific composer of organ music, and his six organ symphonies are seminal works in the repertoire. Between 1914 and 1934, however, Vierne composed only two distinctly sacred pieces, one of which was the triptyque for soprano and organ Les Angélus, op. 57 (1929). These three songs evoke Vierne’s vivid memories of parti­cipating in the Angelus (the recitation of prayers and ringing of bells at the daily Hours) whilst a student at the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (the National Institute for Blind Children). Marcel Dupré was also prolific as an organ, and established a reputation in the 20th century’s early years as a formidable teacher, pedagogue, performer, improviser and composer. He devoted his compositional activity virtually exclusively to the organ after 1920, yet earlier oeuvre reflected more broad-ranging interests. Quatre mélodies date from the opening of the First World War (1914), and the texts are drawn from Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of erotic poetry by Pierre Louÿs published in Paris in 1894. Louÿs claimed that he had translated the original poetry from Ancient Greek, yet it was established that the poems were authored by Louÿs himself, written in the manner of poetry found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, and composed by a woman of Ancient Greece named Bilitis. They are a blend of mellow sensuality and polished style, yet they contain a subtle nostalgic sense of things passing away, never to be regained; a clear reflection perhaps of the year in which Dupré created his music.
—Jeremy Filsell

Central Pennsylvanian Rebecca Kellerman was hailed as “a soprano of grace and elegance” by The Washington Post, and she has performed nationally as both a soloist and as an ensemble singer. She has worked with Bach Collegium San Diego, Chatham Baroque, Three Notch’d Road, Kontrabande, and at the Berkeley Early Music Festival.

For the past twenty years in Washington, DC, Rebecca has appeared in solo roles with The Washington Bach Consort, Opera Lafayette, Cathedra, Chantry, the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble, The Bach Sinfonia and the Wash­ington Chorus, working frequently with Conductors Robert Shafer, Julian Wachner, Ruben Valenzuela, Michael McCarthy, Christoph Eschenbach, Robert King, Jane Glover, Leonard Slatkin, J. Reilly Lewis and Ryan Brown.

Recent solo performances have included Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Couperin’s Leçons de Tenébres, J. S. Bach’s B Minor Mass and Magnifcat, Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, Handel’s Messiah, Arvo Pärt’s Passio alongside collaborations with pianist Jeremy Filsell, and organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt. Her opera credits include Armide (Gluck and Lully), Dido and Aeneas (Purcell), The Medium (Menootti), Semele (Handel), and Die Fledermaus (Strauss).

Rebecca holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in voice performance from Shen­an­doah University, and she studied in both the UK (Dartington International Summer School with Emma Kirkby and Richard Boothby) and Germany (Stuttgart Hochschule). Before moving to New York in 2019, she maintained successful voice- teaching studios in both West Virginia and Washington, DC. Besides working now as a freelance singer and teacher in the New York Metropolitan area, she is Musical Associate for the Children & Family Ministry at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, and assists with the daily training of the boy choristers at Saint Thomas Choir School. This is her first commercial recording and it represents her interest in investigating highways and byways of lesser-­known repertoire.

Jeremy Filsell is one of only a few virtuoso performers as both pianist and organist. His concerto repertoire encompasses Bach, Mozart and Beethoven through to Shostakovich, John Ireland, Constant Lambert and the Rachman­inov cycle, and he has recorded commercially the solo piano music of Herbert Howells, Bernard Stevens, Eugène Goossens and Johann Christoph Eschmann. Recent album releases have included Rachmaninov’s solo piano music (Signum), the first and second Rachmaninov Concertos (Raven), the piano music of Francis Pott (Acis), and Clavier-Übung III of J. S Bach (Signum). Jeremy is on the international roster of Steinway Piano Artists and has recorded for BBC Radio 3, USA, and Scandinavian radio networks in solo and concerto roles. His disco­graphy comprises more than 35 solo recordings. He has taught at universities, summer schools, and conventions in both the UK and USA and has served on international competition juries in England and Switzerland. Solo engagements in recent years have taken him across the USA and UK, and to Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Australia and New Zealand.

Jeremy Filsell was Organ Scholar at Keble College, Oxford University, before completing graduate studies in piano performance at the Royal College of Music in London. His PhD in Musicology from Birmingham City University/Conservatoire was awarded for research involving aesthetic and interpretative issues in the music of Marcel Dupré. Before moving to the USA in 2008, he held Academic and Performance lectureships at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and was a lay clerk in the Queen’s choir at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. In the US he combined an international recital and teaching career with being director of music at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington DC, Artist-in-residence at Washington National Cathedral, and Professor of Organ at Peabody Conservatory (Baltimore), before becoming Organist & Director of Music at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York in April 2019.