Contemporary Works

Vickers is an active proponent of modern song composition. At the 2014 Red Note New Music Festival, Vickers was thrilled to première John David Earnest’s song cycle, the Songs of Hadrian, a homoromantic memorial work detailing the life of the second century Roman emperor Hadrian and his love for his eromenos Antinuous. Vickers commissioned and premièred Tony Solitro’s tour-de-force War Wedding in Philadelphia in 2012.

He is currently engaged in the preparations of five major song cycles, working closely with the composers who are writing for his voice: two works—a cantata that sets Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, and three Shakespeare songs—by Byron Adams; a Michelangelo cycle by Jonathan Green; a cycle that sets the texts of Jewish poets Peretz and Ansky by Jerrold Morgulas; and, a large-scale composition by David Vayo using texts and correspondence from the American twentieth-century.

In January and December 2013, Navona Records released the first two of The Shakespeare Concerts Series recordings, Shakespeare’s Memory and The Fair Ophelia, respectively, on which Vickers is the featured tenor soloist performing multiple world premières of Joseph Summer’s Shakespeare settings. Vickers is engaged by Summer for future CDs in the ongoing series, specifically two separate recorded versions of Michael Tippett’s cycle Songs for Ariel with pianist R. Kent Cook—recorded individually on both piano and harpsichord; and three of Hamlet’s monologues from Summer’s operatic setting of Hamlet with pianist John Orfe, all forthcoming on Navona Records in 2014 and 2015.

Vickers previously recorded for Albany Records, singing the title role of Mario in the professional New York première of Francis Thorne’s opera Mario and the Magician. He was fortunate to perform the world première performance for the composer of the especially-composed aria “Beatriz, puerta del mundo” while portraying the pivotal role of Giovanni in the revised version of Daniel Catán’s Spanish-language opera La hija de Rappaccini. Vickers has sung the world premières of Jerrold Morgulas’s Anna and Dedo in Moscow, Bill Banfield’s jazz-fusion opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Leap Early On, creating the role of Leo Stein, and Tom Cobb in Seymour Barab’s A Perfect Plan, in addition to the world première of Alexander Zhurbin’s Fourth Symphony, City of the Plague, at Moscow’s International House of Music. Vickers was invited by the Britten-Pears Foundation to record world premières of a handful of Benjamin Britten’s songs from his juvenilia.

In 2012, Vickers performed the world première of Benjamin Britten’s excised “Epilogue” to his song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, using Vickers’s own transcription from the composer’s manuscript, which was forgotten in the archives of the Britten-Pears Library—sixty-seven years after Britten composed it. The previous year, the tenor recorded early songs from Britten’s juvenilia at the request of the Britten-Pears Foundation, in Britten’s Music Room with the composer’s Steinway, accompanied by Lucy Walker.

Additional projects for the tenor include the world première recordings of selected songs and the Cycle of Six Love Lyrics by Scots composer Hamish MacCunn on a disc with Britten cycles. Vickers is also recording Alexander Zhurbin's The Shakespeare Madrigals, for voice and piano; Ivor Gurney's Five Elizabethan Songs; Britten's Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac with countertenor Landon Westerfield; Solitro's War Wedding; in addition to Earnest's Songs of Hadrian.