A Song Album

A SONG ALBUM presents several of American composer Stanley Grill’s song cycles for soprano and string orchestra. Dating back into pre-history, poets and musicians have always been the ones to lift humanity up from the mundane and connect us with the deepest part of ourselves. The poems set to music in this album reflect and comment upon themes which are both personal and social, concerns impacting all of us, both individually and collectively.

THE MUSIC

1918. Living through the COVID-19 pandemic, my thoughts often turned to 1918. A century later and people remain the same – and learned so little from the past. As the death toll soared, I searched for poetry for such times and came across a poem by Ellen Bryant Voigt that grabbed my attention with its first line: “thought at first grief had brought him down.” Moved by the poem, I soon learned that this was but one poem of many from a volume of poems, published back in 1995 by W.W. Norton, portraying life during those years when so many died, in a mirror image of what was happening all around the world in our century – yet which seemed strangely lost to our collective memory. All poems by permission of the poet.

A SINGLE THORN is an addition to my Music for the Earth series. Composed as the war in Ukraine continued to rage through a second long month, my thoughts kept returning to the fact that although the world may have turned its attention to the war, impending environmental catastrophe forgotten, climate change was not simply going to come to a halt, waiting for humanity to remember that we needed to act if we are to mitigate the disaster that looms ahead.

The Canadian poet Meg Freer had sent me a number of poems about a year previously, which I had saved waiting for their time to come. With these thoughts in mind, the time seemed right at last. Re-reading them a year later, they echoed my thoughts, beautifully expressing the inseverable connection between our inner world of thoughts and feelings and the world without, the natural world – a world with which we are inextricably linked. A connection which we sever at our own peril. All poems by permission of the poet.

STONE & STAR. Two poems by two very different poets sharing a common theme of the human condition. Hart Crane’s MEDITATION and Rilke’s ABEND. We live between heaven and earth, striving towards both, without belonging to either.

CANZONI D’AMORE. So, here’s a confession. If anyone asked me to name my favorite singer, I wouldn’t hesitate. I simply revel in the sound of Cecilia Bartoli’s voice – and long harbored a fantasy that one day she might sing one of my songs. Of course, it would help if I actually wrote something for her first, but I guess that’s not how fantasies generally work. But after listening to her singing one of the songs from Arie Antiche, I decided, why the heck not. Write something. Sitting in the poetry section of my little attic library, mostly ignored for many years, was a small volume of Italian love songs, many by the Italian Renaissance masters of the “sweet new style” of poetry that seemed just right for the task.

CREDITS:

Composer: Stanley Grill | Soprano: Lisa Rombach | Conductor: Marek Štilec
Orchestra: Chamber Orchestra Mannheim | Producer: Jiří Štilec | Recording Engineer: Václav Roubal