SATURDAY, JAN. 10, 2026 at 7:30 P.M.
Tears of Gold, an exceptional voice & piano collaboration
The Eureka Chamber Music Series has enjoyed presenting many vocal concerts over the years, often featuring promising young opera singers from the training grounds of San Francisco’s impressive opera scene. This season, ECMS presents two singers who are well into brilliant professional careers, mezzo-soprano Laura Krumm and baritone Simon Barrad, joined by the superb collaborative pianist and composer Eric Zivian. They will perform two different sets of repertoire composed expressly for voice and piano, helping us bring the light into the new year with a program titled “Tears of Gold.”
The Mainstage Concert happens on Saturday, January 10th at 7:30 p.m. at Calvary Lutheran Church in Eureka, followed by a more casual Concert and Conversation on Sunday, January 11th at 3:00 p.m. at The Lutheran Church of Arcata. Mainstage Concert tickets are $40 general and $10 for students. Concert and Conversation tickets are $20 general and $5 for students. Purchasing tickets in advance is recommended for this popular concert series, and there are no added fees or service charges when ordering tickets online. Please visit eurekachambermusic.org and follow the “purchase tickets” link. Remaining tickets will be sold at the door.
“Art songs are chamber music just as much as the small instrumental ensembles we love, but today we are far less likely to find them on a chamber music series,” explains Elizabeth Morrison, who writes the program notes for ECMS. “The boundary can blur, but an art song is generally defined as a musical setting of a poem, for one or two voices and piano.”
“Although composers have been writing songs forever,” Morrison continues, “the art song itself came to prominence in the nineteenth century and is deeply entwined with the Romantic movement. More intimate than an aria, more complex than a pop song, more literary than a folk song, the art song was in a sense a product of the Industrial Revolution. A new middle class had come into being with the desire to have music in their homes, but without the wealth they’d need to maintain court musicians. The ability to sing and to play piano oneself became a status symbol showing one had arrived. Composers moved to fill this demand; they would choose poems that spoke to them, interpret them in music, and make them available to a booming market of cultivated amateurs. Called “Lieder” in German and “mélodies” in French, art songs thus began in homes, moved to cafés where people gathered around the piano to sing, and gradually evolved into a concert genre.”
This collection of musicians is the perfect choice for demonstrating how classical vocal technique lends itself to a simpler and more intimate expression of poem and melody. Plus, because these works were originally composed for voice and piano, the piano score is not merely an accompaniment or orchestral reduction, but a living and breathing part of the whole. Who better, then, to serve the role of pianist than Eric Zivian, the cofounder of Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon Music Festival, an annual summer event specializing in performances of Classical and Romantic chamber music on period instruments.
Zivian was born in Michigan and grew up in Toronto, Canada, where he attended the Royal Conservatory of Music. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he received a Bachelor of Music degree. He went on to receive graduate degrees from the Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. He studied piano with Gary Graffman and Peter Serkin and composition with Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, and Martin Bresnick. Since 2000, Eric has performed extensively on the fortepiano, the historical predecessor to the modern piano. At the height of the pandemic, Eric livestreamed all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas on period pianos.
For the Eureka Chamber Music Series, Zivian will serve as the sole pianist on both programs, performing alongside Krumm and Barrad on solos and duets by composers like Gabriel Fauré, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Franz Schubert, and Robert and Clara Schumann, as well as performing a selection of music for solo piano, including two pieces from Robert Schumann’s “Fantasiestücke, Op.12,” and “Cortège” by the British Romantic composer Rebecca Clarke. Saturday’s concert begins with Fauré’s lovely duet “Pleurs d’or,” or “Tears of Gold,” a fitting namesake for the concerts.
Praised for her “exceptionally beautiful mezzo” by San Francisco Classical Voice, mezzo-soprano Laura Krumm most recently made her Los Angeles Opera début as Stéphano in “Roméo et Juliette,” sang the role of the Prince in Cedar Rapids Opera’s production of “Cendrillon,” appeared with Orchestra Iowa as a soloist in Mozart’s “Requiem,” and returned to San Francisco Opera for their production of “Idomeneo.” She recently returned to The Metropolitan Opera to cover Stéphano in “Roméo et Juliette,” sang Eliza in “Omar” with San Francisco Opera, and traveled to Hong Kong to sing Jane Seymour in “Anna Bolena.”
In concert, Krumm joined the Luther College Symphony for Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” and the Alexander String Quartet for performances of Jake Heggie’s “Camille Claudel: Into the Fire” as part of the Chamber Music at Kohl Mansion Concert series. Krumm débuted with the Berkeley Symphony in a performance of Kaija Saariaho’s “Adriana Songs” and joined the UC Davis Symphony for performances of Peter Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs.” She also joined choreographer Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet in their Brazilian tour of “Constellation” where she sang the works of Handel, Vivaldi, and Strauss in collaboration with a performance by the ballet corps. The Iowa native earned a Master of Music from the University of North Texas and is a graduate of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
The versatility of Grammy-nominated baritone Simon Barrad has been heard in genre-bending concerts across the United States and Europe. His talent for unique and innovative programming and arranging – melding new and old, jazz and drama, classical technique and heartfelt folk idioms – has led to recent features at the Metropolitan Opera, Wigmore Hall in London, the Columbus Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, Stanford Live, the Marlboro Music Festival, and Cincinnati Opera. The 2015/16 Fulbright scholar to Finland has also headlined several concerts in Europe including performances at Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo, Finland’s National Opera House, and the Berlin Philharmonie. Through his performing and as a former mentor for ArtSmart, which provides free music and singing lessons to teenagers in underserved communities, Barrad strives to build a more equitable world of empathy and understanding through music.
Barrad holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music where he studied with Kenneth Shaw. He has collaborated with artists including Mitsuko Uchida, Jonathan Biss, Awadagin Pratt, and Ignat Solzhenitsyn. Barrad also holds a Bachelor of Music in Voice and a French Language minor from the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
DATES/TIMES
- Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026 : 7:30-9:30 p.m.
WHERE
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- Phone: 707-273-6975
- Email: admin@eurekachambermusic.org
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