Professor Mathew Releases New Album Tracing Early Haitian Music

Together with baritone Jean-Bernard Cerin, artistic director of the Lisette Project, and the soprano Michele Kennedy, Nicholas Mathew -- pianist and Professor of Music at Berkeley -- has released the album Lisette: A Song's Journey from Haiti and Back on the PARMA/Navona label. The recording traces the three-century journey of the earliest surviving song text in Haitian Creole, following its transformations across Haiti, France, and the United States. Emerging in colonial Saint-Domingue, Lisette quitté la plaine moved through salons, abolitionist circles, Creole households, and concert stages, absorbing new meanings along the way. Across several solo performances and chamber collaborations, Mathew plays on no fewer than eight historic pianos.

Link to the record website.