Winter Words: Songs by Britten

The recording was made in the wake of a recital tour in 2010-11 which
culminated in his Carnegie debut at Weill Hall. A graduate of the Manhattan
School of Music and an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera studio Nick
has performed with the opera companies of Los Angeles and Seattle,
symphony orchestras of Atlanta, St. Louis and San Francisco, and the
Marlboro, Ravinia and Edinburgh Festivals, among others. He sang in
Stravinsky's Pulcinella with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Boulez which won a Grammy Award.

Nick presents a deeply personal perspective of Britten's music, encompassing his own performing experiences to
audience reaction. He says: "I've been a fan of Britten since playing his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with my
youth orchestra in Detroit as a teenage violinist. But my great devotion to his music increased to an obsession when an
excellent pianist and good friend asked if I'd perform with her at a small university in Missouri. She suggested Winter
Words, saying, "I think these would sound really great in your voice, and I've wanted to play them for ages, so indulge
me." I researched and played through Britten's settings of Hardy's poems and before long, I was hooked."

Approaching the performance in a small Midwestern town with some trepidation ("how would they react?"), Nick describes
the audience's overwhelmingly positive response: "my favourite piece on the program … the most lasting impression." Such
is the enduring quality of Britten's sophisticated yet direct song writing, of which Nick is a leading torch-bearer.