DISCOGRAPHY
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DON'T ADD TO HEARTACHE
Don’t Add To Heartache is a multidisciplinary nature-themed sound album, co-composed by Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea and British composer Tom W. Green. The album incorporates singing, spoken word, acoustic instruments, field recordings, electronics, natural objects; live recorded elements of the album also include a video score and an improvising dancer. With this selection of texts and musical responses, we ask: ‘What does it mean to witness and interact with our land?’ 'What is real and what is artificial?' Among the lavish growth of nature, we also witness the harm done by our species, via pollution, construction and deconstruction, which has placed our earth on its last leg. By making contact with nature, are we connecting, or are we destroying? "'Don't Add To Heartache' is not just an album, but a profound experience... Lamprea's voice leades us through a sonic jungle, accompanied by Green's masterful compositions. The combination of beauty and vulnerability makes this album a haunting work." - AM:plified Magazine, February 2024
"...this album is an impassioned exploration of sound, space, and the relationship between nature and humanity... Top to bottom, Don't Add To Heartache is a fiercely inventive body of work that urges listeners to consider their relationship with nature in an increasingly artificial world." - The Skinny, March 2024 Full list of reviews and interview can be found here |
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GEORGES APERGHIS: 14 RÉCITATIONS
Georges Aperghis’ 14 Récitations (1977-78) is a concert-length avant-garde song cycle for unaccompanied female voice, performed by Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea and released on New Focus Recordings. Abandoning traditional use of text, the 14 Récitations set phonemes and vocal sounds with atonality, extended vocal techniques, puzzles, and repetitions. Throughout the opus, the listener witnesses a woman attempting in many ways to speak, but not being understood, and thus trapped in her trauma. “We see and hear a singer realizing a musical score, but at the same time we witness somebody who can’t speak properly…” Aperghis writes. “That is the human dimension of this work. We see people in their daily life struggle, people who are not very healthy, people with trouble expressing themselves - elusive mental portraits en miniature.” The resulting work is an ode to the dynamism and humanity of the voice, but it is also a manifestation of the woman’s complex journey of personal authenticity in a patriarchal world. "This is not simply music; it’s performance art of the highest caliber. There is singing, shouting, screaming, laughing, all manner of vocal emotion... Lamprea, a fearless genius of a performer, is constantly moving the goalposts and redefining modern music by tackling the most challenging compositions with bravura and passion." - PopMatters.com, February 2023
"The young soprano achieves to 'humanize' the stress and schizophrenia present in the music, navigating them with naturalness and spontaneity due to the cycle's complex emotional landscape. Due, perhaps, to her operatic training, Lamprea emphasizes rightly the dramatic component of the fourteen pieces, carrying out with it a work of formal construction without precedents. It is surprising that a work like this, whose text —as Tim Rutherford-Johnson rightly points out in his notes—“at best teeters on the edge of intelligibility”, becomes so intelligible and communicative in her hands." - Scherzo España, March 2023 Full list of reviews and interview can be found here |
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QUAKING ASPEN
Colombian American soprano Stephanie Lamprea releases her debut album, Quaking Aspen, a collection of new music for solo voice and voice plus electronics, via New Focus Recordings. This record sets poetry and sounds of the natural world to unaccompanied voice, with words written by female poets from the 19th through 21st centuries. Placing text at the forefront, each poem is first spoken, and then sung to mesmerizing and distinctive musical interpretations. The record begins with Jason Eckardt’s Populus tremuloides: "Quaking Aspen", a wordless vocal soundscape using an array of timbres and extended techniques to represent the living form and motion of the Catskill Mountains’ quaking aspen. Moving through music of Wang Lu, Kurt Rohde, James May, George Gianopoulos, and Hannah Selin, through the words of Lucy Corin, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Donna Masini, and Edith Wharton, the listener is met with vibrant and vulnerable interpretations of text, soaring vocalises, and mercurial acrobatics abound. William Bond provides spoken word on this album. “Rarely does one hear a debut as artistically bold as this one. Stephanie Lamprea, a Colombian–American soprano, demonstrates her iconoclasm and fearless commitment to new sounds right out of the gate…It’s an impressive display of extended vocal techniques, in the honorable tradition of such forward-looking artists as Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian and Joan La Barbara.”
STEPHANIE LAMPREA: QUAKING ASPEN (Opera News, June 2022) Full list of reviews and interview can be found here |
POSTCARDS is an album of improvised vocals and live electronics performed by Stephanie Lamprea and Alistair MacDonald, recorded live in Glasgow on 10 March 2022. The set was inspired by field recordings made by Alistair in different parts of the world, including Spain, Lithuania, France and Malaysia. In the live performance, field recordings were played followed by improvisational responses.
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BECOMING A LANDSCAPE is an album of guitar music composed and performed by Colombian musician Juan Calderon. He is joined by Stephanie Lamprea in his 6 Songs for Soprano & Guitar on Poetry by Octavio Gamboa.
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Unaccompanied: Tiny Works for Quarantine
This is a collection of short songs for unaccompanied voice, written during the quarantine period of COVID-19. What began as singing one new work for one composer, grew very quickly into an ongoing commissioning effort, which is already expanding into multiple volumes. I am extremely grateful to the composers who have written music for me in this strange time - within mandated isolation and loss of work due to the virus, I have found new purpose and identity through championing each composer’s sound world, and I hope that this album further advocates for their incredible talents and careers.
"Unaccompanied Volumes 1 and 2 find composers thriving within the constraints of extreme brevity, and Lamprea carving sublime, beautiful, comic, and haunting scenes of isolation that come to life upon pressing play." - ClevelandClassical.com, May 2020
Full list of reviews and interviews can be found here
"Unaccompanied Volumes 1 and 2 find composers thriving within the constraints of extreme brevity, and Lamprea carving sublime, beautiful, comic, and haunting scenes of isolation that come to life upon pressing play." - ClevelandClassical.com, May 2020
Full list of reviews and interviews can be found here
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