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Helen Lyons is a dramatic soprano with a big voice. Originally from Williston and now a resident of Ferrisburgh, she has had an international career in opera, soloing with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in China and performing lead operatic roles at Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, Germany, and the Bronx Opera in New York City.
Since returning to Vermont in 2016, Lyons, the music manager at Vermont Public and host of its classical morning show, has performed as a soloist with ensembles such as Barn Opera, the Vermont Philharmonic and Aurora Chamber Singers. Opportunities to hear her nuanced and theatrical voice in a more intimate solo recital have been rarer.
One of those opportunities will come this Sunday, January 14, at Burlington's Cathedral Church of St. Paul when Lyons, 48, sings art songs, or settings of poems, composed mainly by women, accompanied by Burlington pianist Elaine Greenfield.
Lyons and Greenfield first collaborated at Middlebury Song Fest in 2019, performing several works by Fanny Mendelssohn and Alma Mahler. These women's compositions recently emerged from the shadows cast by the famous men in their lives — Fanny's brother Felix and Alma's husband, Gustav.
After that performance, Lyons said during a call, "We always said, 'Let's do a full program [of women composers].'" Along with song settings by Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann of poems by fellow German Romantic Heinrich Heine, the Sunday program includes Lili Boulanger's settings of French poems by Maurice Maeterlinck. Boulanger, another reclaimed female composer, was the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize, in 1913.
Lyons will also explore works by three lesser-known women. Pauline Viardot-Garcia was a 19th-century French "triple threat — composer, pianist and opera singer," as Lyons called her, who was well known in her lifetime and a friend of George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. Florence Price and Margaret Bonds were two 20th-century Black Americans a generation apart who became friends while living and composing in Chicago.
Lyons said those three composers never came up during her extensive musical education: "These women are very new to me."
Price and Bonds had "not only gender but race challenges," Lyons continued. "They were celebrated in their time, but not as much as they should have been."
Born in Arkansas, Price enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music in 1902 as a Mexican to avoid the pervasive prejudice against Black people. "She was light-skinned enough that she could pass," Lyons said. Recently, Price's orchestral works have gained widespread recognition. Lyons will perform her settings of poems by Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Bonds studied piano and composition with Price as a teenager before enrolling at Northwestern University in 1929. There, Lyons said, "completely ostracized by her peers because she was Black, [Bonds] happened upon a book of Hughes' poetry. She said that gave her the strength to persevere." Bonds went on to attend the Juilliard School and become good friends with Hughes. Lyons will sing her settings of poems by Hughes and Robert Frost.
Lyons, who is white, noted that "part of me does feel a little awkward [singing Price and Bonds], but it's just wonderful for them to be heard."
The only deviation from the women-only program is a premiere by Lyons' Vermont Public colleague James Stewart of his setting of Margaret Atwood's poem "There Is Only One of Everything."
A tenor, Stewart said he set the Atwood song with Lyons' voice in mind.
"It's a big voice with a lot of power, but also she knows her instrument so well that she can be lyrical and pensive and quiet at the same time," he said. "I was leaning on her ability as an opera singer to tell a story."
Correction, January 10, 2024: An earlier version of this story misstated the type of soprano Helen Lyons is. She is a dramatic soprano.