Songs of Sac Prairie
An American song cycle for Mezzo-Soprano and Bass-Baritone
Ronald William Hill, composer
August Derleth, poet
This beautiful American song cycle written by Chicago composer Ronald William Hill is set to the poetry of August Derleth, one of Wisconsin's most famous and beloved writers.
Audrey Johnson and Metropolitan Opera Bass-Baritone William Powers have been featured in numerous performances of this work, most notably, the premiere of the cycle in its orchestrated form with the Wooster Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Jeffrey Lindberg in February of 2020.
Past recorded performances of the work featuring Audrey Johnson and Mr. Powers have received support from the Illiinois Arts Council and the Sanfilippo Foundation, and they were finalists for the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music from The American Prize.
Musical Selections
Snowy Night - Orchestral Preview
In rehearsal for the orchestral premiere performance
with the Wooster Symphony Orchestra
Maestro Jeffrey Lindberg conducting
Audrey Johnson, Mezzo-Soprano
Hushes in the stubbled corn,
Along the fence line,
Comes, windless, down on pasture’s edge,
The snow.
In the lit town the fine flakes sifting down
Make the streetlights show
as flowers, chrysanthemums.
Snow lies thickening white on boles, on fence posts,
And under lamplight bright as day.
The solitary walker on his lonely round
Hearing whispered, wordless voices all around,
Would not think anything so animate, so white,
Could come out of so dark a world as night.
Lifelong he thought first of hogs, cattle, sheep,
But failed to think that cutting trees
Made less for them to drink in pond and brook.
Anson Boggs cared for his creatures and his house
Killed wild things, bird and mouse.
If at first he prospered, he soon grew thin.
He did not understand how man can kill his land.
He worked it before dawn,
All morning, all afternoon, sometimes at dusk,
Yet every year, his crop grew less, and he knew fear.
He ploughed from edge of long-ploughed hill,
To the ploughed rim of neighboring wood,
And starved the land, until at last
The land starved him.
Anson Boggs
William Powers, Bass-Baritone
Ronald William Hill, piano
Every man sets out upon his own,
Begins alone, and ends alone.
Even a point like earth in space
Could be a dark and devious place.
And a man could go astray
For lack of signs along the way.
In search of his own Walden he could meet
Many inviting byways, many a primrose street,
Unless he had a guide to keep from getting lost:
Thoreau, or a book of poems by Robert Frost.
Audrey Johnson, Mezzo-Soprano
William Powers, Bass-Baritone
Ronald William Hill, piano
Lily Manzer
Audrey Johnson, Mezzo-Soprano
Ronald William Hill, piano
Safe in her rind of life, shorn of her bloom,
Poor Lily sat in the window of her room,
Day and night, lost in the jungle of her mind.
Delicate, frail, the happy child she was
Had grown by priestly wickedness
Into this pale, weak-minded woman kept alone.
She lived in her dark, narrow room
Until she took a narrower, more dark.
In the weft and loom of life
She was early broken by all she trusted.
All her love unspoken, all her life held down,
All her dreams alone.
She is no lonelier beneath her stone.