In the Wake of the Marseillaise: Songs of Love, Loss, and Triumph from the Age of Emancipation

Brotherhood Synagogue
28 Gramercy Park South
NY, NY 10003

Jessica Gould, soprano
Pascal Valois, early romantic guitar

In the Wake of the Marseillaise
Songs of Love, Loss, and Triumph from the Age of Emancipation

The fall of the Ancien Régime radically re-shuffled the social order throughout European capitals, ushering in a new era in inter-religious understanding and mass democratization.

As the ghetto walls separating Jew from Gentile came tumbling down along with the unquestioning acceptance of clerical and royal authority, a newly ascendant bourgeois class demanded new compositions for the domestic sphere, with popular references and playable scores accessible to those with neither an aristocratic pedigree nor a piano.

Songs for soprano and Early Romantic Guitar by Cimarosa, Crescentini, Doisy, Haydn, Domenico Puccini and Fernando Sor join jewel-like arrangements from the popular operas of the day by Rossini and Halévy, speaking of an age of liberation and a growing taste for Bel Canto singing.

The historic Brotherhood Synagogue on Gramercy Park, housed in a mid 19th-century structure that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, sets the stage for songs from an age of liberation.

Pascal Valois, French Canadian virtuoso on Early Romantic Guitar, joins soprano and Salon/Sanctuary Artistic Director Jessica Gould, playing an instrument constructed in 1821.

“A dramatic intensity that honored the text” — The New York Times

“Pascal Valois and his instrument are united in an absolutely masterful and rigorous delivery.”— Journal Le Métropolitain de Toronto

“gentle and affecting…intense and dramatic…a joyous luminosity” — Lute News, UK

“An extraordinary voice, very clear diction, rich and inimitable sound” — Monica Huggett