The Far Country
Cabrillo Festival Orchestra with Apollo Quartet & Strings, JoAnn Falletta conductor; Atlanta Singers, Kevin Culver conductor Contemporary Classical Recording of the Year 1993 --Creative Loafing, Atlanta "Dream in White on White" (1992) is a musical landscape on the non-chromatic ("white") tones and non-tempered intervals of Pythagorean diatonic tuning. It is a response to the clarity of those sounds, and to the treeless, windswept expanses of western Alaska. "Night Peace" (1977) is based entirely on a single melodic line, which is heard only once, sung by the solo soprano at the end of the piece. This melody was conceived in the luminous stillness of a moonless winter night. "The Far Country of Sleep" (1988) was composed in memory of the late Morton Feldman. Although he was an unrepentant urbanite, Feldman's music is, for me, haunted by the idea of the sublime landscape, imaginary or real. The title of this homage to him is borrowed from a poem by John Haines. It evokes in my mind both the distant dreamscapes of the Arctic and that ultimate wilderness, through which we all must pass. The score is inscribed with a line from Alexander Pope, which Feldman once recited to me: Art after Art goes out, and all is night ... ... Night Peace is what new choral music is all about. --John Schaefer, New Sounds Available here: iTunes HDtracks Beaming Contrasts
Alexander String Quartet; David Tanenbaum, guitar; William Winant, percussion; Julie McKenzie, flute; Lawrence Granger, cello; Marc Shapiro, piano An appealing combination of intricacy and rhetorical straightforwardness, and the five pieces included here afford a good entree to his work. --San Francisco Examiner Both "Journey to Still Water Pond" and "Night Lights" were completed and first performed in the Fall of 1983 in New Haven at Yale University, even though "Night Lights" was actually the rescoring of a string quartet that I originally composed in 1980. "Night Lights" later received its official premiere by the Alexander String Quartet in San Francisco in November of 1988. "Beaming Contrasts" was commissioned by the Alexander String Quartet and the Newman/Oltman Guitar Duo in the Spring of 1988 as a guitar sextet and received its premiere in that version in Washington, DC, and New York City in January of 1990. The latter performance was broadcasted over National Public Radio. I later rescored "Beaming Contrasts" as a guitar quintet at the request of David Tanenbaum and the Alexander String Quartet. "Little Trio" was commissioned by Sonus Lyricus in the Winter of 1987 and received its premiere in San Francisco the following May. "Through the Mountain" was commissioned by bassist Steve Tramontozzi of the San Francisco Symphony as a compostion for double bass and piano. It was premiered in that version with Marc Shapiro at the piano in the Spring of 1990 in Berkeley, and was later rescored for cello and piano or orchestra in August of 1991. --Peter Scott Lewis Available here: iTunes HDtracks |
New Albion Records, Inc.Archives
October 2010
|