Music @ Pane e Vino returns with a special evening sharing the music of KU/Lawrence composer Forrest Pierce.
I am excited to welcome my dear friend and former colleague at KU, composer Forrest Pierce, to Pane e Vino along with soprano Suna Avci Gunther and pianist Brianna Matzke for what will be a powerful and intimate evening of beautiful music. Forrest and I were frequent collaborators over nearly 20 years, and sharing his art with you here at Pane e Vino is an honor.
Walk Deep is a cycle of 18 songs setting texts from Abigail Morgan Prout’s Wayfarer. Written for soprano Suna Avci Gunther and pianist Brianna Matzke, the music moves through modern art song, funk, bluegrass, romantic lieder, blues, disco, Monteverdi arias, and minimalist pulsation, exploring connection, loss, gratitude, and the natural world. Walk Deep Blurbs Walk Deep Blurbs
Tickets are $25 per person, with all proceeds going directly to the artists. Wine will be available for purchase throughout the evening.
Friday, October 16, 6:30pm
doors open at 6:00pm
WALK DEEP, by Forrest Pierce and Abigail Morgan Prout
Walk Deep is a cycle of 18 songs on texts from Abigail Morgan Prout’s Wayfarer Press book of the same name, each of which reflect some echo of the composer’s own search for meaning and connection in a world undergoing great upheaval and confusion. Within the images of profound immersion in the lives of nonhuman creatures of all kinds is a music of intimate humanness. Aging and dying parents, miraculous friendship, imminent danger, horrible and ecstatic sex, and above all a heartbroken longing for physical contact with other hands, earth, trees, dogs—anything—drive the cycle through an arc of joy, despair, self-knowing and profound gratitude.
Prout’s book, winner of a 2023 Nautilus Award, and the 2021 Homebound Poetry Contest, is a transcendent collection of poetry on isolation, inner transformation, and connection to the natural world. Its origin, however, was as a series of daily poetic dispatches during the early months of the 2020 pandemic. Prout, isolated with her family on remote Lopez Island in the Salish Sea of Washington State, spent her days walking alone through the giant conifers of the island forests, communing with the empty ocean vistas, and writing fierce, fiery poetry of loss, grief, gratitude and family reconciliation. These missives of beauty, both joyful and anguished, arrived daily as they were written in the inbox of composer Forrest Pierce throughout the quarantined summer of 2020. Longtime friends, Pierce (himself a poet) and Prout have shared a connection through their artistic enfoldment with the natural world, their shared spiritual practice in the lineage of Inayati Sufism, and their Northwestern roots.
While on solo meditative retreat in 2024 at Prout’s off-grid Lopez Island property, Pierce conceived of a concert-length cycle of songs built from the echoes of Prout’s daily poems, written for soprano Suna Avci Gunther and pianist Brianna Matzke, with whom the composer has ongoing collaborations. Gunther, who premiered and continues to present Pierce’s micro-opera Cassie Leaves Nebraska with her consortium SALT, and Matzke, who commissioned and premiered Pierce’s incantatory piano vision Something, Shimmering as part of her concert Tremor, are at once collaborators and muses for the work’s technique and expression. The result is a collection of fractured echoes from radio landscapes: modern art song interleaved with funk, bluegrass, romantic lieder, blues, disco, Monteverdi arias, and minimalist pulsation, resulting in an epic journey of creation, exploration, and resilience.
Suna Avci Gunther
Dr. Suna Gunther (she/her/hers) joined the Glenn Korff School of Music in Fall 2021 as Assistant Professor in the Voice, Musical Theatre, Opera, and Jazz areas.
As a member of the SALT quintet, Dr. Gunther has co-commissioned eight composers and librettists to develop what has ultimately become a touring performance entitled A Mosaic of Mothers. This work, comprised of three micro-operas (by Rachel DeVore Fogarty, Forrest Pierce, and Lisa Neher), a 5-movement piano piece (by Jeeyoung Kim) and student-sung quartets (by Emily Feld) honor female ancestry across the United States by telling stories of real-life women of multiple generations. SALT has been selected to present at the College Music Society, National Opera Association, and as the keynote presenter at the 2026 No Barriers Conference.
As the co-founder and Director of Soo Opera’s Apprenticeship Program in Sault Ste. Marie, MI, Dr. Gunther has brought dozens of aspiring young artists from across the U.S. and Canada to Sault Ste. Marie, MI each summer since 2022, where they work with industry professionals to perform leading roles in their own orchestrated touring opera production, cover leading roles in Soo’s mainstage opera production, and perform arias and scenes in their Apprentice Showcase with professional orchestra. In this capacity, Dr. Gunther has stage directed Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus.
Dr. Gunther received her Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University as a double major in Voice & Opera Performance and Instrumental Music Education with an emphasis in alto saxophone. She received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in Vocal Performance, with minors in Music History & Literature. In her doctoral research, she explored the ways composer Kurt Weill targeted specific audiences for propaganda pieces during World War II by conscientiously drawing from his past compositional styles.
Dr. Gunther previously taught at Berea College in Kentucky while simultaneously serving as coach and pianist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She led 100 performances of children’s opera across the state of Kentucky as pianist, narrator, and assistant music director through UK’s outreach program, worked for the UK-affiliated Academy for Creative Excellence teaching K-12 Musical Theatre lessons and classes, and taught at the nonprofit Central Music Academy. Dr. Gunther then moved to the University of North Dakota as their Instructor of Musical Theatre-Voice. In that position, she worked with BFA students teaching Applied Voice, music directed all productions, and created specialized core curriculum classes catering to contemporary styles. Her most recent role was Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Voice at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where her teaching responsibilities included Applied Voice instruction, Vocal Diction (French, German, Italian, English, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, and Russian), Vocal Pedagogy, Performance Repertoire class, and Vocal Literature. Her ensembles included Opera and Musical Theatre Workshops, Mixed Vocal & Instrumental Chamber Ensemble, Motown Ensemble, and a Beyonce cover band, in addition to directing, conducting, and producing numerous staged productions of musicals and operas.
Dr. Gunther was honored to represent UNL on a trip to Vietnam as part of the Global Arts Academy in 2024. She was also invited to be a faculty member at the Brancaleoni International Music Festival in Piobbico, Italy in 2023. She spent a decade prior as a “cultural ambassador” of the U.S. State Department, a role that took her to Saudi Arabia, Chile, Kuwait, Micronesia, Peru, Cambodia, Singapore, the Marshall Islands, Turkey, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia. On the behalf of embassies and consulates, she performed concerts representing the past century of American music and given workshops to local musicians. She was a sixteen-year member of Chicago’s Grant Park Chorus and remains an active recitalist of solo and chamber music. Recent performances include the operatic roles of Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro), Musetta (La Boheme), Flora (La Traviata), and Dorabella (Cosi fan tutte) and concert performances with the Lincoln Symphony, Schenectady Symphony, Muscatine Symphony, and Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra.
Dr. Gunther is a strong advocate for music pedagogy that spans a breadth of backgrounds, representation, and genres. She is on the Editorial Board of the SongHelix database which facilitates the research of varied and themed art song repertoire and was a member of the 2019 class of NATS interns. She has also developed ties with Ege University and Akdeniz University in Turkey, where she explores the use of improvisation in Turkish folk and art song genres. Dr. Gunther’s arrangements of Turkish Songs for Voice and Piano are under contract with Hildegard Publishing, with a targeted release of March 2026.
Brianna Matzke
Dr. Brianna Matzke's dynamic pianism shows “a sense of refinement, flair, and technical prowess” (clevelandclassical.com). An avid performer and commissioner of new music, she has collaborated with many composers, including Tina Tallon, Marc Mellits, Michael Fiday, Elliot Cole, Molly Joyce, Alexandra du Bois, D. J. Sparr, Danny Clay, Jennifer Jolley, John Glover, and Evan Williams. She has appeared in concert across the globe; recent appearances include concerts in Italy, Beirut, São Paulo, and in series such as TriBeCa New Music, Vanguard New Music Series, ETHOS New Music, Re Festival, neif-norf New Music Marathon, and the Accidental Music Festival.
Often called upon for her vision and leadership, Matzke is a widely respected executive and artistic director. As the Executive Director of the Wyoming Fine Arts Center and the Cincinnati-based concertnova ensemble and concert series, she oversees a broad range of artistic, educational, and community initiatives. She is also the founder and artistic director of an ongoing and acclaimed commissioning initiative, called The Response Project, which asks composers to write music for piano in response to a pre-existing artwork or idea. The project has premiered and recorded dozens of new works, and often invites artists from other disciplines (such as film, painting, and poetry) to also create and present responses in large-scale community events.
Additionally, in 2021 Matzke was named CEO and President of the International Foundation for Contemporary Music, and appointed as Executive Director of the Cortona Sessions for New Music. Through these positions she works as an advocate for new music across the globe, leading an annual two-week-long contemporary chamber music institute and assisting in the production of many projects, concerts, and recordings.
In addition to performance and leadership, Brianna is a dedicated music educator and pedagogue. She is a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (NCTM), and as Executive Director of the Wyoming Fine Arts Center, she leads a multidisciplinary arts organization dedicated to education and community engagement, while maintaining an active private piano studio. She has also served on the faculties of Wilmington College, the Oberlin Conservatory, Interlochen Arts Camp, Thomas More College, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Preparatory Department. She is founder of the World Piano Teachers Association Ohio Chapter and maintains an active presence as a member of the Music Teachers National Association. She holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) and the University of Kansas.
Forrest Pierce
Forrest Pierce, composer, poet, and librettist, writes music of meditative stillness and ecstatic virtuosity rooted in a deep connection to the natural world. He has written 200 or so compositions, which include solo vocal, chamber, and choral music in equal measure, most often guided by poetry and scripture from the world's great mystical traditions. Winner of the Barlow Prize, the Ortus and Avalon international competitions, as well the international choral competitions of the Boston Chamber Singers and Boston Choral Ensemble, his “otherworldly compositions” (Flutist Quarterly) have been praised as “marvelously appealing” (National Sawdust Log) for their “flowing legato lines” and “expansive depiction of Mother Earth” (I Care if You Listen), as “persistent and captivating…the most emotional experience of the evening’s program” (KCMetropolis), and simply, “glorious.” (San Francisco Classical Voice) His music is recorded on New Focus, Blue Griffin, Innova, and Meyer Media labels, and has been premiered by Volti, The Kansas City Chorale, the BBC Singers, the Esoterics, the Australian Voices, the Latvian Radio Chorus, numerous University and community ensembles, and noted chamber musicians across the world.
These days, Forrest is curious about silence, darkness, and nature as sacred realities, rather than as metaphors, symbols or poetics. He spends his days composing and teaching music at the University of Kansas, his evenings singing and making music with family and friends, and his vacations swimming in any body of cold wild water he can find.