Soulful Serenity: Maria Riccio Bryce’s ‘Requiem’ Takes Center Stage in Three Local Churches

Walk across Amsterdam’s Mohawk Gateway Overlook Bridge, and proud words of Maria Riccio Bryce lie at your feet, literally set in stone: ”What once was home is home again… my Amsterdam!”

These words from her “Amsterdam Oratorio” map the pilgrimage of the ambitious composer, arranger, keyboardist, singer, and actress from home to home. Her evolution in organizing major musical forces to express humanistic themes resonate in her recently completed “Requiem” in three performances May 26-28 in large area churches.

Musically, she grew from solo pianist to opera and Broadway fan, stage performer, London “fringe” theater impresario to composer/performer, cooking up original creations from emotional elements in the “ingredients of my own musical recipe.” 

As she explained in recent emails, loss means “unforeseen calamities… (and) we are stripped of what we held dearest.” Loss asks, “Who are we, without our most cherished belief or our most beloved person?”

Redemption after loss inspires her, as do forgiveness, courage and the immortality of love.

Home means a “sanctum of safety and self-knowledge that allows us to navigate our way in the world” – a feeling as much as a place.

Home means Amsterdam, where her world changed when men delivered a piano. Then nine, she was the eldest of four sisters whose father insisted they have piano lessons. He asked around, “Who is the strictest piano teacher in Amsterdam?” The answer: austere, elderly Miss Marion M. Rulison, whose grand piano bore a bust of Beethoven. “She took my right hand in hers and placed my thumb on middle-C. That moment was the start of my story,” wrote Riccio Bryce, a moment that made sense of sound and sound of sense.

She learned to play Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin; her father played “Live at the Met” opera on the radio and brought home sheet music for the 1960s pop he loved by Mantovani, Carmen Cavallaro and Eddie Duchin. When she was 10 or 11, their mother took the four sisters to the Amsterdam Summer Musical. Led by Bert DeRose and funded by the city Recreation Department, they featured large casts. “They were incredibly good,” she recalled. “The whole city would come out to see these shows.”

There she saw her first musical, “Carousel.” She knew “I had witnessed something extraordinary, and I wanted to be a part of it.” So her father brought home sheet music for Broadway hits “Carousel,” “Oklahoma,” “South Pacific,” “My Fair Lady,” and “The Sound of Music.” She played these classic show tunes on piano, taught her sisters to sing them, and at 12, formed the Riccio Sisters singing group. “My sisters could really sing…they were really good.”

Their “stage father” had a seamstress make matching outfits; she booked their first gig, a talent show. They lost but kept busy playing DAR meetings, veterans’ dinners, Jerry Lewis telethons and local TV shows, including “Teenage Barn.”

In high school, she played Anita in “West Side Story,” Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl,” Jocasta” in “Oedipus Rex” and other leads. “My senior year at Amsterdam High School, I won the Kirk Douglas Award for best actor,” she told Times Union reporter Kristi Gustafson Barlette for a “20 Things You Don’t Know About Me” feature. Riccio Bryce said, “Douglas called me from Hollywood to congratulate me. Thirty years later, he paid for the recording of my work ‘The Amsterdam Oratorio.’”

After graduation, she was musical director of the city Summer Musical, earning $60 a week for ten weeks of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” She thought, “The big time couldn’t be far behind…”

First came college, or colleges.

At all-women Manhattanville College, she was to train as a music teacher but instead wanted to perform. Nearby, Iona had a theater program but no women. She hitchhiked to an audition, passed, and played the title role in “Major Barbara” and other leads, winning the Best Actress Award in the 1970 NYS College Theatre Festival for “Mother Courage.”

That summer, she sang in the chorus at the Weston Playhouse in Vermont in “Anything Goes” and “Finian’s Rainbow” before taking over the fall-season cabaret as music director. There she also met British-born actor Alan Bryce.

“Right after college, I married my Brit and went to live in London, where we joined the ranks of out-of-work actors,” wrote Riccio Bryce. Over the next decade, they founded and led the Overground Theater.  Her OK British accent “doesn’t cut the pie when you’re living in England!” So she turned to directing and writing. 

Then, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cut Arts Council funding for 41 theaters, including Overground, “We knew we were in big trouble.” Riccio Bryce and her husband went slyly autobiographical: “What if we wrote a musical about a young married couple running a successful fringe theater who lose their Arts Council grant?”

The musical’s title, “A Time of Your Life,” echoed William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” the source of a quote Riccio Bryce loved. “In the time of your life, live – so that in that wondrous time, you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world but shall smile at the infinite delight and mystery of it.”

Creating it together was less than a delight, however, and it flopped, though its music was well received.

“Our theatre closed,” Riccio Bryce wrote. “Our marriage was in big trouble.” They left London for home, where “I had the uncommon experience of returning to my own country as an immigrant.” They brought little money,  two young sons and a third, in utero.

“When I came back to upstate New York as an adult, it was with a different sense of the place,” Riccio Bryce wrote; dense, deep and dark, but beautiful.

They soon moved to Washington, DC, where husband Alan worked at the Kennedy Center, and Riccio Bryce wrote music for Center radio and TV ads.

When Alan’s job ended, lean years in Amsterdam followed before he became Development Director at Proctors in Schenectady. Riccio Bryce wrote scores for several plays. Though never produced, they nonetheless built her confidence. “I felt ‘my powers’ coming into their own,” she wrote.

“What once was home is home again” indeed. 

Then a breakthrough opportunity drew on her composing, directing and performing powers, built from that first middle-C at the piano through operas on the radio; sheet-music show-tunes; a family singing group; lead roles on school and college stages and maybe most crucial of all, as musical director of her hometown Summer Show and co-leader of a London theater group.

“Proctor’s hired me to direct their annual Christmas Show,” she wrote, comparing these complex productions to Radio City Music Hall Christmas shows.

Directing this extravaganza prepared her for her own first major work: The Schenectady YWCA asked her to develop an original musical honoring its anniversary.

Inspired by changing leaves she saw on commutes from Amsterdam to Schenectady; she wrote “Mother, I’m Here,” a revue on life’s phases. A cast of eight sang a womb-to-tomb women’s story through 17 original songs and poetic transitions. Riccio Bryce wrote busily while her children were in school, led rehearsals, then the premiere at Proctors.

The big curtain went up, and her excitement, too. “Nobody had ever seen this show before. Two hours later, curtain down.”

Surprised when she heard a standing ovation, “I knew I was in flight.” 

Then YWCA board member Cathy Lewis recalled. “It was a wonderful, unique and ambitious way to celebrate the 100th birthday of the YWCA.  It was an outstanding event.”

Dot Valachovic, another former board member, hailed it as “a unique approach to emphasize the association’s mission of empowering women…We absolutely were pleased with the production and story.” 

Encouraged, in full flight, Riccio Bryce wrote and produced other major works, noted here with her descriptions and additional notes.

• “Hearts of Fire” A musical commissioned by Schenectady in 1990, about the…Massacre of 1690. This featured a cast of 60 men, women and children. It was produced twice at Proctors.

• “The Amsterdam Oratorio” A full-length choral work that premiered in 2001, comprised 16 songs, each one featuring a different aspect of life in my hometown. (Her father’s childhood friend Isadore Demsky financed the recording of this work by engineer Ralph Sherry at Cathedral Sound Studios. Demsky was known in Hollywood and around the world as Kirk Douglas. Sherry married Riccio Bryce’s sister Connie and earlier recorded “Hearts of Fire;” he was also a bassist with rock bands including the Motions, Fox, and the Cosmic Messengers.)

• “Swan Song” A “musical memoir” produced in Amsterdam in 2016.

• “Home Again” A retrospective of my work. 2019.

• “Remember Me, Remember You” A Christmas album of original songs and arrangements of time-honored favorites, recorded in 2021. (Inspired by the arrival of her first grandchild.)

• “Requiem: What Remains is Love” (Premiered in November 2022; Sten Yngvar Isaachsen recorded the performance, available on CD and via streaming services.)

Riccio Bryce explained how this latest work grew indirectly from working as musical director of St. Luke’s Church in Schenectady.

Parishioner Diane Lazarou Morrone recalls Riccio Bryce and her sisters from school in Amsterdam. “They were all very intelligent and talented, but Maria seemed to stand out,” said Morrone.

“As the music director for St. Luke’s…they have a real gem in her, and it is such a treat going to mass there…she is responsible for an outstanding Christmas concert the church holds every year…(also a summer musical). She is a class act…Maria is their pride and joy.”

In 25 years in the choir loft, Riccio Bryce has seen “from that distance…some of the most personal moments of their lives” – baptisms, weddings, funerals, sometimes all in a single family.

She has been “amazed by the fierce and punishing strokes of bad luck, cruel fate, tragedy that have entered the lives of our fellow human beings, and changed them forever,” she wrote. She was called on to “provide music for funerals…we all know should never,  ever be happening.”

A heartbreaking example came in October 1999 when a young couple whose wedding she’d played some years before attended mass as she played piano.

Moved by the sincere faith of the young couple, she found their happiness – the wife was very pregnant, the husband proud – contrasted painfully with her own mood. “I was all torn apart because, on that particular Sunday, my marriage was coming to its complete and final end.”

The next Sunday brought terrible news.

“The beautiful young mother had gone into labor the day before,” Riccio Bryce wrote. “Something went hideously wrong, and she hemorrhaged…She was rushed to Albany Med, but they could not save her. She was able to hold her infant daughter for a few moments, and then she died. Her funeral was scheduled for St. Luke’s at the end of the forthcoming week.”

Riccio Bryce felt the community’s grief but didn’t feel she should be its voice, sing its song. She told her home-from-college middle son Andrew what had happened but that she couldn’t play for her funeral. Andrew urged, “Not only must you play for her funeral, but you should try to write something for her husband and their baby.”

Over several sad days at the piano, Riccio Bryce wrote: “what I thought this woman would want to say to her husband, if she could, on the day of her funeral.” She got permission from both the priest at St. Luke’s and the grieving husband to perform it and found herself “bringing comfort to the broken-hearted, to the grieving, on one of the saddest days of their lives.”

Years after that sad loss, but guided by that same sense of mission and redemption that inspired her farewell song, Riccio Bryce started writing her Requiem in January 2022. She finished in May and led the premiere at St. Luke’s last November. Her piano part isn’t scored on paper: “It’s all in my head.” 

She is preparing for the three “Requiem” performances at the end of this month. As she told Bob Cudmore on his “The Historians” podcast series, Riccio Bryce sees the piece as a realistic look at the end of earthly life and what may come next. Its overture proclaims, “I Was Born to Sing.”

She believes music is a calling. “It almost doesn’t matter whether you believe it is the product of fate, luck, happenstance, genetic predisposition….or divinely bestowed. I had a vocation” – not in the church-institutional sense but a life’s work. “I was aware of it, almost from the start,” wrote Riccio Bryce.

“Maybe it stems from all those Italian operas roaring through the house on Saturday afternoons when I was an impressionable child. But the fact is, I put a very high premium on love. I had a very difficult final decade with my marriage…(Ending it) was anguishing to me, but it ultimately released me, and I found myself reborn.”

Maria Riccio Bryce leads three performances of her “Requiem” – 7 p.m. on Friday, May 26, at St. Paul’s Episcopal  Church (21 Hackett Blvd., Albany); 7 p.m. Saturday, May 27, at First Reformed Church (8 N. Church St., Schenectady Stockade); and 3 pm. Sunday, May 28, at Trinity Lutheran Church (42 Guy Park Avenue, Amsterdam).

Riccio Bryce accompanies and conducts from the piano, leading a cast of 21 adult singers and three pre-teen children and four musicians.

The featured singers are Ann Marie Adamick, mezzo-soprano; Jean Johnson, alto; Richard J. Miller Jr., tenor; John Allen, baritone; and 24-year old Devin Canavally, bass. “He sings ‘Soldier;’ I’m really proud to have that heard over the Memorial Day weekend,” Riccio Bryce wrote.

The players are Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, violin; Sosuke Aizawa, cello; Norman Thibodeau, flute; and Robert Morris, percussion. 

Admission is by voluntary donation rather than a specific ticket price. 

CDs of “Requiem: What Remains Is Love” are available for sale at Amsterdam Free Library (28 Church St.) and available via Spotify and other streaming services, for example: