Elena Ruehr celebrates a nearly three-decade collaboration with baritone Stephen Salters in new disc out on AVIE Records May 2, 2025

Composer Elena Ruehr celebrates a nearly three-decade collaboration with baritone Stephen Salters in new disc out on AVIE Records May 2, 2025

Elena Ruehr: Songs for Stephen

Elena Ruehr (b. 1963), composer

Stephen Salters, baritone

Donald Berman, David Zobel, piano

May 2, AV2672

Songs for Stephen presents a nearly three-decade collaboration between composer Elena Ruehr and baritone Stephen Salters. Ruehr describes the time “a handsome and charismatic young man approached me after a premiere of one of my compositions at Boston University. He asked me to write him a song cycle for his debut recital with the Bank of Boston’s Celebrity Series. I told him to send me a recording of his singing and I’d think about it. The first note I heard Stephen sing sent a bolt of energy down my spine: this was the singer I had always wanted to write for!”

Salters reciprocates, “What a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration has landed in my life both professionally and personally with Elena. From my first personal musical envelopment of her first song ever written for me, I truly fell in love with her creations for me, and thus we began this truly special and unique journey.”

Ruehr sets some of America’s most notable poets, including Cuban American and National Humanities Medal recipient Richard Blanco, who read his own work at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. Obama, himself is a subject in Guggenheim Fellow Elizabeth Alexander’s work Five Men, also included in this anthology. Alexander adds to the liner notes, “In these poems, now set to exquisite and soul-stirring music by Elena Ruehr and sung to the heavens by Stephen Salters, Black men speak across two centuries. How they think about freedom is varied; each sings from both his historical moment as well as an interior space that is lyrical, exploratory, and visionary.”

Ruehr also sets poetry for children – both dark and light – from leading light of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes and feminist-activist Adrienne Rich. The addition of the four-minute Lied, set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, is a reference to Ruehr’s Germanic ancestry as well as to the first song – by Schubert – that Ruehr heard Salters sing.

ELENA RUEHR (b. 1963)
Songs for Stephen

Five Men
Elizabeth Alexander
I. Blue Prelude
II. Waiting for Cinque
III. Nat Turner Dreams of Insurrection
IV. Carver’s Song
V. The Elders

Lied
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
sung in German

Travel Songs
Richard Blanco: Directions to the Beach of the Dead
I. Somewhere to Paris 
II. A Poet in Venicen 
III. Torsos at the Louvre 

Wonderful Bears
Adrienne Rich: Bears

Stephen Salters, baritone
Donald Berman, piano

Lullabies & Spring Songs
Langston Hughes
I. Signs of Spring
II. April Rain
III. City
IV. Sandman
V. Year Round
VI. Autumn Thought
VII. Stars

Stephen Salters, baritone
David Zobel, piano

Elena Ruehr says of her music ‘the idea is that the surface be simple, the structure complex.’ And from Gramophone magazine: ‘The sound world is wholly Ruehr: it never sounds like anyone else, and the effect is exhilarating … her output is unified by her desire to communicate effectively without compromise…’

Currently composer in residence with Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra, she has a major list of recordings including her orchestral works (O’Keeffe Images, BMOP/sound) as well as the opera Toussaint Before the Spirits (BMOP/sound), her cantatas Averno (with the Trinity Choir, Avie), and her Six String Quartets (the Cypress String Quartet, Borromeo String Quartet and Stephen Salters, Avie). Her other recordings include Icarus (Avie), Jane Wang considers the dragonfly (Albany), Lift (Avie), Shimmer (Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble, Albany) and Shadow Light (The New Orchestra of Washington with Marcus Thompson, Acis), as well as many others.

In addition to having a standing collaboration with QuartetES, her works have been commissioned, recorded, and performed by numerous other string quartets, including the Arneis, Biava, Borromeo, Cypress, Delgani, Lark, Quartet Nouveau, Roco and Shanghai string quartets. An award-winning faculty member at MIT, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute and composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Known for her vocal music and collaboration with poets, she has written five operas, five cantatas and a number of songs. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School, and has also written extensively for orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble, chamber ensemble, instrumental solo, opera, dance and silent film. Her work has been performed internationally and described as ‘sumptuously scored and full of soaring melodies’ (New York Times) and ‘unspeakably gorgeous’ (Gramophone). Dr. Ruehr has taught at MIT since 1992 and lives in Boston.

Baritone Stephen Salters, a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Voice at the University of Tennessee, has performed extensively throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, the UK and the USA. He created the title role in Elena Ruehr’s tour de force dance opera Toussaint Before the Spirits for Opera Boston and premiered Ruehr’s Crafting the Bonds about American writer and former slave Hannah Bond. Recent appearances include Wagner’s Rienzi and Walton’s The Bear at Boston’s Odyssey Opera, Philip Glass’s Symphony No.5 at the Kennedy Center and at New York City’s Trinity Church, a historic sesquicentennial vocal recital honoring Harry T. Burleigh at Skidmore College, and Mr. Salter’s debut with the New York Philharmonic, singing in Central Park for over 100,000 spectators.

Other highlights include concerts with the orchestras and symphonies of Baltimore, Belgium, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Frankfurt, Houston, Minnesota, Monte Carlo, Paris, Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Francisco, Tokyo and St. Luke’s and appearances at Tanglewood, Ravinia, Pietrasanta, Vail and other American and European festivals; world premieres of Ysaye Barnwell’s Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, Daniel Sonenberg’s The Summer King, Philippe Fénelon’s Les Rois; Monteverdi’s Orfeo in Orvieto, Italy; Shostakovich’s The Nose; Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; Gluck’s Alceste; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte; Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and L’elisir d’amore; Handel’s Alcina and Giulio Cesare; Rossini’s La Cenerentola; Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci; and Britten’s Peter Grimes at Tanglewood on the 50th anniversary of that work’s US premiere.

Mr. Salters has demonstrated his versatility on the concert stage, from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion through all styles and periods of the traditional repertoire until Mahler’s Symphony No.8 and beyond. A versatile stylist, he has also appeared in pops programs, including with the Boston Pops on their national holiday tour. A celebrated recitalist, Mr. Salters has thrilled and moved audiences all over the world and is a much sought-after interpreter and advocate of new music. He conducts masterclasses and has a residency called Until Now: Discovering Your Life-Force.

Stephen Salters has worked with leading conductors including Christoph Eschenbach, Seiji Ozawa, Robert Spano, Bobby McFerrin, Nicholas McGegan, Keith Lockhart, Leonard Slatkin, Hugh Wolff, Jane Glover and Julian Wachner. His most recent recordings include Spirit: Are You There? You Are There and several world-premiere performances and recordings including William Bolcom’s Billy in the Darbies (written for Mr. Salters and the Lark String Quartet) and Elena Ruehr’s Toussaint Before the Spirits, Averno and Gospel Cha-Cha.

Donald Berman’s recordings include The Unknown Ives Volumes 1 and 2, The Uncovered Ruggles, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives with Susan Narucki (New World), the 4-CD set Americans in Rome (Bridge) and the Avie recordings This Island and The Edge of Silence with Narucki, Icarus with the Borromeo Quartet, and The ‘Concord’ Sonata. Berman is Chair of Piano at The Longy School of Music of Bard College, President of The Charles Ives Society and General Editor for the three-volume Shorter Piano Works of Charles E. Ives (Peer and AMP/G. Schirmer).