Jeremy Huw Williams has performed in North and South America, Australia, China, India and across Europe, appearing in more than 60 operas (photo credit: jeremyhuwwilliams.com).
Jonathan McNair had a singular reaction when he learned that world-famous baritone Jeremy Huw Williams wanted to perform two of his compositions.
“How did I get so lucky?” recalled McNair, the Ruth S. Holmberg Professor American Music at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. “It made me feel really good that he recognized the skill and the artistic value in my work.”
On Sept. 19-20, Williams will be at UTC to perform, hold master classes with music theory and composition students taught by McNair and interact with students in a class taught by Dr. Aaron Shaheen, the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature who is co-sponsoring Williams’ trip to UTC.
“I think that I’m collaborating with a distinguished composer and also with this rather distinguished poetry person,” Williams said.
A native of Wales, Williams may not be familiar to the average person, but if you’re in the world of music, especially classical and opera, his name brings instant recognition.
He has performed in North and South America, Australia, China, India and across Europe, appearing in more than 60 operas—including “Carmen,” “La Boheme,” “La Traviata” and “Cosi fan tutte.”
“The guy has performed practically everywhere,” McNair said. “He really cares deeply about the music.”
Jeremy Huw Williams
On Sept. 19 at 7:30 p.m., Williams will perform a free concert in the Cadek Recital Hall. The performance is open to the public, but seating is limited. He will be accompanied by pianist Alan Nichols, who graduated from UTC with a master’s degree in music in 1991 and now is a keyboardist for the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera.
Williams also will conduct two master classes with UTC music students. On the afternoon of Sept. 19, he will work with voice students of Drs. Rebecca St. Goar and Perry Ward; on Sept. 20, he will work with McNair’s music composition students. Also on Sept. 20, he will visit Shaheen’s Modern American Literature class.
The connection between Williams and UTC began in February 2023 after McNair’s piece “Rabun Gap” was performed by pianist and composer Max Lifchitz and livestreamed worldwide. Williams saw the performance.
“Within a day or two, I had an email from Jeremy saying, ‘Hi, I am Jeremy Huw Williams, and I really enjoyed your piano piece, ‘Rabun Gap’ and would you happen to have any songs for baritone?’” McNair recalled. “And, of course, I said, ‘Yes, I do.’
“We started corresponding by email, and I sent him some music, and he said, ‘Well, I’d love to perform these for you.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, why don’t you just come to UTC?’”
And so he is.
Williams won’t perform “Rabun Gap,” but he will perform McNair-written musical pieces inspired by the works of several famous poets, including “Nocturnal Songs,” which is based on poetry from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” collection.
“Whitman loved to reflect on the qualities of the nighttime and the sort of soul reflections that one might make in the nighttime, and how the nighttime and moonlight changes the look of things on Earth,” McNair said. “Whitman was quite connected to the earth and to other human beings, so it felt like a good idea to make a musical setting.”
For Williams, singing and poetry are an inextricable alliance.
“All singers should have a great interest in poetry. It goes without saying, but it’s not often the case that they really are interested in what they’re singing about,” he said.
Singing musical pieces inspired by poetry makes Williams a good fit for his literature class, Shaheen said. In the class, Williams will perform musical pieces set to works by the “War Poets,” Englishmen who wrote poetry about and during World War I.
“They wrote in the trenches and not just retrospectively. Some of them didn’t make it out of the trenches,” Shaheen explained. “A lot of it was published at the time, and they were writing in a really kind of pivotal moment in the history of poetry.”
Williams is familiar with the War Poets. In 2005, he released a record—“The Great War Remembered In Songs And Poems”—with material that combined music with the poets’ works.
“The art of writing poetry well is to do with technique. It’s finding the right word to put in the right place,” Williams said.
“It’s important for anybody who is studying poetry and who wants to make a life of poetry to be able to speak poetry in the way that an actor would speak from a Shakespearean stage, or that a singer—a good singer—would approach poetry that is set to music. The technique is the same; the technique of delivery is the same.
“I find that many students, especially the younger students, unless they have a flair for this and a love previously, they find it very difficult. It’s embarrassing to speak aloud. Many students wouldn’t even think about speaking a poem aloud.”
Williams also is dedicated to preserving and highlighting the music of Welsh composers and, in 2022, was given the John Edwards Memorial Award, the most prestigious non-competitive award given in Wales for service to the nation’s music.
“We have many singers in Wales. We’re known as the Land of Song,” Williams said.
He’s not strictly an opera singer either and performs modern compositions, a choice not that common in the world of classical singing, McNair said.
“He’s committed to music of now, not just of then, and I really appreciate that about a performer. And Jeremy does it so enthusiastically,” McNair said.
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