As both musical and life partners, soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan McCullough bring an intimacy to their performances that speaks to their many years of collaboration. Praised as “breathtaking” by The Wall Street Journal, the husband-and-wife duo has performed throughout North America and Europe in such venues as New York’s Merkin Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Di Menna Center; London’s Wigmore Hall; and Toronto’s Koerner Hall, in addition to a recent appearance on PBS’ Great Performances.
Committed to the performance of contemporary works alongside the art song canon, Fitz Gibbon and McCullough have worked closely with emerging and established composers alike. Among the growing body of works dedicated to them are compositions by Niccolo Athens, Dante De Silva, Andrew Hsu, Anna Lindemann, Pablo Ortiz, and Alan Louis Smith. Through the guidance and research of musicologist Mackenzie Pierce, Fitz Gibbon and McCullough have given the US premieres of numerous works by mid-20th century Polish composers, and have given modern premieres of important Yiddish-language works by Moses Milner, Joel Engel, and Alexander Krein through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series. Their discography includes works by Sheila Silver, James Primosch, John Harbison, and Katherine Balch. Forthcoming albums include Pablo Ortiz’s collected art songs and Johannes Brahms’ Die schöne Magelone on an 1857 Johann Baptist Streicher piano.
Equally at home in their individual careers, Ms. Fitz Gibbon has appeared as a soloist with such ensembles as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Lucerne Academy Orchestra; Tafelmusik; the Albany, Eureka, Richmond, and Tulsa Symphonies, and the American Symphony Orchestra in her Carnegie Hall debut. Mr. McCullough has appeared as a concerto soloist with major orchestras, including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic, and has performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group and contemporary ensemble eighth blackbird.
THIS SEASON’S PERFORMANCES
October 2024 – Selections from Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch, presented by Brooklyn Art Song Society at Roulette
November 2024 – Mount Holyoke College: Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture in the Decades before Braille. Recital with Ryan McCullough, keyboards. South Hadley, Massachusetts.
January 2025 – Works by Richard Strauss, Robert and Clara Schumann, Adela Maddison, and Sergei Rachmaninov; presented by Melbourne Chamber Music Society
May 2025 – Works by Franz Schubert and Elizabeth Ogonek; Harvard Musical Association
RECENT PERFORMANCES
November 2023 – Brahms’ Die schöne Magelone, presented by Music for Food Boston; New England Conservatory’s Brown Hall
November 2023 – Lecture-recital with Dr. Timothy Barringer, presented by the Delaware Art Museum
October 2023 – Works by James Primosch, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
September 2023 – Brahms’ Die schöne Magelone at Bard College (modern piano) and Cornell University (lecture-recital with Dr. Erik Born, performance & recording on 1857 Johann Baptist Streicher piano)
September 2023 – Chamber Music @ New Park; Ithaca, NY
July 2023 – Works in Yiddish for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival with violinist Yurie Mitsuhashi and vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Lorin Sklamberg; Washington, DCJune 2022 – Works by Sheila Silver, SongFest
June 2023 – Alan Smith’s Surfing the Thin Places, SongFest
May 2023 – Two different programs presented by the Eureka Chamber Music Series; Eureka, CA
December 2022 – Works by Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Adela Maddison; Ithaca, NY
November 2022 – Recital with bassoonist Marlène Ngalissamy for Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; Philadelphia, PA
August 2022 – Works by Clara Schumann, Adela Maddison, Joel Engel, Pablo Ortiz, and Margaret Bonds for Kneisel Hall; Blue Hill, ME
May 2022 – Evidence of Things Not Seen, Brooklyn Art Song Society
March 2022 – Premiere of Katherine Balch’s estrangement, Cornell University
February 2022 – Memorial concert for James Primosch, University of Pennsylvania
January 2022 – Lecture recital with Tim Barringer, Pittsburgh Frick (pivot to virtual performance)
December 2021 – Die schöne Magelone, Harvard Musical Association
November 2021 – Alexander Krein’s 10 Yiddish Songs, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (virtual performance)
November 2021 – James Primosch Memorial Concert for New York Festival of Song. To be premiered virtually in 2022.
August 2021 – Works by Schubert and Amy Williams, Bard College Conservatory (virtual performance)
May 2021 – New works by Alex Weiser, Chris Rogerson, Loren Loiacono, and Emily Cooley for Kettle Corn New Music (virtual performance)
February 2021 – Lecture recital with Dr. Mackenzie Pierce (University of Michigan) for the “Music, Sound, and Trauma” conference at Indiana University. Works by Tadeusz Kassern, Zygmunt Mycielski, and Grażyna Bacewicz.
November 2020 – Joel Engel’s Yiddish Folk Songs (modern premiere) for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
September 2020 – Broadcast of PBS Great Performance’s Now Hear This “The Schubert Generation.” Viewable online until October 23.
July 2020 – Made at Avaloch live-stream performance featuring works by Sheila Silver
June 2020 – Recital featuring works by Adela Maddison, William Grant Still, Florence Price, and Clara Schumann, The Stissing Center
June 2020 – Works by Juliana Hall (live-stream); East Granby Make Music Day
June 2020 – Modern premiere of Moses Milner’s 10 Children’s Songs of Y.L. Peretz (live-stream) for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
February 2020 – Lecture-Recital for opening of Victorian Radicals at the Yale Center for British Art.
January 2020 – Sparks & Wiry Cries songSLAM Festival featured recital, DiMenna Center, NYC. Program includes works by Clara Schumann (Op. 13 and 21), Adela Maddison (Cinq mélodies), Alan L. Smith (Surfing the Thin Places), and Sheila Silver (Love is a magic ray).
September 2019 – Recording with recording engineer Judith Sherman of Sheila Silver’s Beauty Intolerable for forthcoming CD, also featuring Dawn Upshaw, Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, Gilbert Kalish, and others
August-September 2019 – Premiere of Anna Lindemann’s The Colony; University of Connecticut, Storrs
August 2019 – Residency at Avaloch Farm, recital at United Church of Penacook
July 2019 – Lecture-Recital, Yale Center for British Art
PRESS
“[Fitz Gibbon’s] singing embodies—envoices—another paradox: she can be coldly unsparing and warmly lush, sensual and clinical, even at the same time. She retreats into bittersweet reverie, then, in the next line, awakens in a fit of renunciation. Her vocal and emotional ranges are vast and cogenerative. A singer of astounding technical control, Fitz Gibbon deploys those gifts in service of the necessities of the poetry. In her performance, the cycle becomes an unflinching dissection of the decayed romantic body. Alongside at the coroner’s slab that is the grand piano, McCullough provides the soundtrack of the unconscious, inseparable from the narration, but uncannily apart from it—complementing, commenting, contradicting, complicating.” (CounterPunch, September 2024)
““Only once did she feel loved by a man / on what we might call / the wash of the cellular level.” So begins Balch’s estrangement (2020), which sets the poetry of Katie Ford (b. 1975) in an astonishing song cycle. Intended as the dark side of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, it turns the paradigm of north-bearing love into a spinning compass. Fitz Gibbon renders a body through her voice and McCullough the molecules it inhales and exhales. As in the textual play of György Kurtág, though with more attention to punctuation, Balch holds every syllable accountable for its unfolding, allowing the mind to fantasize and count it for reality. Fitz Gibbon clothes the words mindfully, flipping the operatic switch on and off at will, morphing from lullaby to whisper to microtonal shiver to aphasic slur without hesitation.” (Sequenza 21, October 2022)
“Harbison’s Simple Daylight is a cycle comprising six poems of Michael Fried, an American poet whose poetry has engendered strong musical impressions in the composer, who has previously set a number of his poems. Harbison’s complex harmonic language is on full display in this cycle, and he draws from a rich palette of effects, including trills, tone clusters, and even simple lines. All of these are characterized by a very free rhythmic pulse—to the point, in fact, that these songs do not seem to be cast in any one meter for any length of time. There is also an air of delicacy that pervades many of these settings. Like every other work I’ve heard by this composer, these pieces amply demonstrate their creator to be a major artistic voice of our era. Lucy Fitz Gibbon is an exceptionally intelligent and nuanced singer, whose firm control of every note of these exquisite songs helps convince the listener of their masterpiece status. Her pianist collaborator Ryan MacEvoy is most sensitive and musical in his role in helping bring these pieces to life. He seems born to play this music.
[…]
I am very far removed from being a singer, but I shall nevertheless sing the praises of both [Fitz] Gibbon, whose pure voice and sensitive phrasing pleased me to no end, and MacEvoy, who complements her with his sublime piano artistry. This proved to be a most enjoyable recital, making it very easy to recommend it to any and all who happen to read this review.” (Fanfare Magazine, Jan/Feb 2021)
“Ryan McCullough plays the fourth movement of the piano sonata No. 19 before being joined by his wife, singer Lucy Fitz Gibbon, for the Schubert song “Suleika,” which, like most of the music, is breathtaking.” (Wall Street Journal, September 2020)
“Performances by the husband-and-wife team of Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, who worked with both composers to realize this recording, are magnificent.” (Broad Street Review, June 2020)
“This inaugural concert, entitled Out of Silence, for The Stissing Center began with Fitz Gibbon singing Six Lieder (1844) by Clara Schumann with McCullough at piano. Lucy possesses a marvelous natural soprano voice with effortless scale movement and warm, emotional texture. Her voice projects sincerity and delight. She [sang] as if German was her native language. As a team, Lucy and Ryan appear to enjoy lightning synchronicity. As a pianist Ryan plays with svelte, meditative flow.” (Millbrook Independent, June 2020)
“Then Ms. Fitz Gibbon returned with her regular recital partner Ryan McCullough for Wuorinen’s A Song to the Lute in Musicke (1970, text attributed to pre-Elizabethan poet Richard Edwards). The duo is splendidly matched, and Mr. McCullough’s piano handling of the disparate lines is extremely sensitive. They continued with Babbitt’s Du (1951), text by August Stramm, who died at age 41, killed in action in WWI). This is the “oldest” music on the program. Stramm’s terse, darkly expressionist poems were fully inhabited by Ms. Fitz Gibbon, and here the musical language matched the sentiments well.” (New York Concert Review, December 2018)
“Pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon are a powerhouse duo with a dynamic and diverse repertoire, and their recitals always delight audiences with something new.” (Lansing Star, February 2018)
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano 