Alumni, Student and Faculty Performers Join in 'A Tribute to Stanley Irwin' Thursday

October 13, 2008

October 13, 2008, Greencastle, Ind. - Performers and guests will be traveling to Greencastle from across the United States this week to join in "A Tribute to Stanley Irwin." The DePauw University School of Music will present a concert in honor of the late professor and acclaimed vocalist this Thursday, October 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church. The program is open to the public and will feature performances by friends, colleagues, and students of Stanley Irwin, who passed away May 31.

Four artists, who worked with Dr. Irwin during their undergraduate years at DePauw students and have now advanced to successful professional careers, will participate in the tribute concert: Alison Bates '01, Thomas L. Potter '81, April Marie Scholten Sokolova '03, and JennyRebecca Winans Walker '02. A large number of School of Music faculty, both vocal and instrumental, will also be featured in the program, as will an ensemble of current students specially formed for the occasion. (at right: Stan Irwin leads the singing of A Toast to DePauw at commencement; May 18, 2007)

"The Chamber Singers will perform the Neue Liebeslieder Walzer by Brahms, which Stan loved so dearly," explains Gabriel Crouch, director of DePauw Choirs, "and the concert will end with the 'Dona Nobis Pacem' from Bach's B Minor Mass -- another of Stan's favorite works, and the piece which gave him his final professional engagement as a soloist."

Stanley Irwin taught voice at DePauw from 1975 through the 2007-08 academic year. The New York Times called him "a performer who can project a wide range of subtle, shifting emotions." Hans Hotter, with whom Irwin studied in Munich, described him as possessing "a bass-baritone voice of high quality in timbre, which he is in good command of," noting a "fine artistic sensitiveness, together with a gift for interpretation ... especially evident in his singing of the German classical Lied."

Irwin performed more than two dozen roles in opera, most of the major works in oratorio, and an extensive song repertoire, including roles such as Boris and Germont, the Bach Passions, Elijah, the Verdi Requiem, Britten's War Requiem, Berlioz's dramatic symphony Romeo et Juliette, and Schubert's "Winterreise" and "Müllerin" song cycles. He has also appeared in world premiere performances of John Eaton’s Peabody Award-winning opera Myshkin (Keller) for PBS and Italian television, Schibler’s The Late Expiation (Marquis) at the Zürich Opera, and David Ott’s song cycle "Renascence" (Millay) commissioned for Irwin and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. He has also recorded for the Gothic and Four Winds labels and has been artist-producer of two compact discs of American popular classics, Irwin Sings Gershwin (1999) and Night & Day: Cole Porter Songs of Romance (2003).

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