Hello!  My name is Nicholas Phan, and I am seeking your support of my upcoming recording project: Illuminations.

For this project, we have been very fortunate to receive a matching grant from an anonymous donor.  Every contribution that is given up to $10,000 will be matched 1-to-1 by this donor, therefore doubling the amount of every donation received. 

This means that your dollars donated will have twice the impact!  Please read on to discover more details about this project!

For this fifth recording project, I am turning to the incredibly rich French song repertoire, as well as making a return to recording the music of Benjamin Britten, whose music has long been a passion of mine to perform. The program of this project will include the music of revolutionary Parisian Belle Époque composers Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, pairing two of their seminal song cycles, Ariettes oubliées and La bonne chanson, with Benjamin Britten's incredible orchestra song cycle, Les Illuminations.

For the Debussy and Fauré portions of this project, I will be reuniting with my longtime musical partner, pianist Myra Huang. Recital partners for the past 15 years, we have performed together all over the world, including Carnegie Hall, Atlanta's Spivey Hall, University of Chicago, Boston's Celebrity Series, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and London's Wigmore Hall. For the Fauré cycle, we will be joined by the recent winners of the prestigious Naumberg and Fischoff competitions, the Telegraph Quartet.  For the Britten, I will join The Knights, with whom I have collaborated many times at many music festivals, including Tanglewood, Ravinia, and the NY Phil Biennial.

The link that ties these three seemingly unrelated cycles together is the incredible story behind the two poets whose poems inspired these composers to compose these song cycles: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Leading up to his marriage to Mathilde Mauté, Paul Verlaine experienced an outburst of creativity and wrote one of the pinnacles of his published oeuvre, La bonne chanson. Just two years later, after reading poems submitted to him by a 17 year-old country boy prodigy, Verlaine invited the young Arthur Rimbaud to Paris, sparking a scandalous and tumultuous affair between the two men that took them all over Europe. During this period, Rimbaud wrote and published his revolutionary masterpiece, Les Illuminations, and Verlaine wrote his infamous Romances sans Paroles, which was published while he was in prison, after shooting Rimbaud in the hand during a lover’s quarrel that got out of hand one fateful night in Belgium.  These two men revolutionized French literature, as well as many other art forms - most notably music - through their work, laying the groundwork for much of the art of the next century.

Britten’s famous setting of Les Illuminations was written as he was beginning his life-long romance with the tenor, Peter Pears.  Fauré’s settings of poems from La bonne chanson mark the pinnacle of his powers, and a major turning point in his compositional style. Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées, taken from Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, are some of his most famous songs. All three cycles represent some of the most beautiful and imaginative musical settings of French poetry ever composed.

This album will be recorded in two parts.  The first two-thirds will be recorded September 26 & 27, 2017 at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, CA.  The last third of the album will be recorded at Drew University on October 6, 2017 in New Jersey.  

This album will be released in April of 2018 on Avie Records, who also released my first three albums, Winter Words, Still Falls the Rain, A Painted Tale and Gods & Monsters in 2011, 2012, 2015 & 2017 respectively, each to critical acclaim.  Winter Words, Still Falls the Rain and A Painted Tale all made many 'Best Albums of the Year' lists, including those of The New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune. Gods & Monsters, released at the beginning of this year, was a "Critic's Choice" in Opera News.

Avie's unique business model is based on artist ownership.  What I love about this model is that it allows for the utmost freedom artistically. Avie's model of artist ownership also places the responsibility for finding funding for recording projects on the artists, which is the reason for my appeal to you!  Every single one of my albums has been underwritten through crowd-funding - enabling each of the above success to make the transition from dream to reality.  

The funds raised from this campaign will be used to cover the costs of artist fees, album production, post-production, artwork design, CD manufacturing, and marketing.  The amazing thing about recording versus live performance is that it enables a musician to reach the widest audience possible.  Any contribution you make will allow us to bring this phenomenally beautiful and powerful music to the world, and help touch people's hearts the way it has so moved ours.

Thank you so much in advance for your support: we can't wait to share this fantastic music with you!