Singer finishes strongly with 'Soul Fox' recording


LAWRENCE – Lyric soprano Julia Broxholm believes she’s going out on a high note – figuratively speaking – with her 2017 recording “The Soul Fox” (Equilibrium Records).

The 62-year-old associate professor and director of the University of Kansas School of Music’s voice division says she’s lost control of a few of the highest notes in her once-expansive upper register, so “The Soul Fox” will likely be her last recording.

“This was a kind of culminating thing for me,” Broxholm said recently.

And while the recording contains a group of songs Broxholm and her favorite accompanist, pianist Russell Miller, have performed over the years called “Epitaphs and Elegies,” as well as a series of 11 Ned Rorem songs titled “Women’s Voices,” the title selection is a suite of five songs by Lori Laitman with lyrics by poet David Mason.

“The Soul Fox” was commissioned in 2013 by Reach Out Kansas Inc., an Overland Park-based nonprofit dedicated to the creation of new music and to music education, and by its founder, attorney James Zakoura, and his family foundation.

“I was really fortunate with this commission,” Broxholm said. “I selected Lori Laitman as a composer because I am excited about the abundance of female composers right now who are having success, and because I had sung some of Lori’s music and thought it was beautiful and uniquely well-suited to the voice.”

Broxholm said she asked Laitman to write for her and her 20-plus-year recital partner, Miller, a faculty member at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Laitman suggested setting the words of Colorado-based poet David Mason to music.

“The Soul Fox” is based on a series of confessional poems Mason wrote based on his feelings about having been involved in an adulterous love affair.

“David was in the midst of this affair that none of his friends knew about, and he was absolutely tortured by it,” Broxholm said. “Once he decided to move into a relationship with this woman and make it open with everyone, there was an outpouring of poetry that came out of the emotional experience; how badly he felt about himself while this was going on, and what it meant to come clean in his life.

“The first song in the cycle, ‘The Man Who Lied,’ is Dave in the midst of that turmoil, living that double life and hating it and seemingly powerless to do something to change it. But then, of course, we know he did change it. ‘The Woman in the Blue Sarong’ is the woman he was involved with who was really the love of his life and who he ultimately decided to be with.”

The title song, “The Soul Fox,” itself, Broxholm said, was based on a poem inspired by the sight of a red fox crossing a field of new-fallen snow.

“The poet says, ‘My love, the fox is in the yard,’ and that’s how the poem starts,” Broxholm said. “The footprints will melt, but the shared experience of them seeing this magical creature in the yard will stay with them, much like the connection they have between themselves will stay. So the fox is really emblematic of a soulful moment they experience together.”

Laitman’s song cycle had its world premiere at Swarthout Recital Hall in the fall of 2013, but it took a few years for Broxholm and Miller, both busy academics, to put out a recording. They joined “The Soul Fox” song cycle to a series of other songs they had recorded in recent years with an eye toward such a release.

As for the Rorem songs, Broxholm said, they had only been recorded once previously, and she thought they deserved more.

“I am trying to ensure that the American song literature that I think is important gets at least a first recording and possibly a second recording, so people can Google it and say, ‘Oh, I can listen to two or three recordings of this work, and I think I want to learn it. I want to program this work; I want to share this with the audiences.’ That’s what I am all about.”

Photo: Julia Broxholm photographed by Meg Kumin, KU Marketing & Communications

Tue, 05/01/2018

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Rick Hellman

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