“A hugely compelling vocal and theatrical presence” (Philadelphia Inquirer), 2009 Academy of Vocal Arts graduate Ben Wager makes his PCMS debut with a program highlighted by Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel. Written between 1901 and 1904, this work represents Vaughan Williams’s first major foray into song writing. Drawn from a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson poems of the same name, the cycle offers a rather different take on the idea of the wayfarer cycle. Stevenson’s world-weary yet resolute traveler shows neither the naiveté of Schubert’s miller in Die schöne Müllerin nor the destructive impulses of the heroes of Schubert’s Winterreise and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

Program includes a medley of serenades by Brahms, Mussorgsky, Mozart, Schubert and Rachmaninov, and Vaughan Williams’s cycle Songs of Travel.