Project Summary
A recording of A SINGLE THORN and other songs for soprano and string orchestra series by the Chamber Orchestra Mannheim, conducted by Marek Štilec with soprano Lisa Rombach. Scheduled for April 2025.
Project Description
A SINGLE THORN. This music was 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.
1918. This score is an arrangement for string orchestra of the original composition for mezzo soprano, violin, 2 violas and cello. The texts are drawn from Vermont poet laureate Ellen Bryant Voigt’s book “Kyrie” – sonnets about the 1918 flu pandemic. The music was composed during the COVID pandemic in response to the disheartening fact that a century after the horrific events described in this book of poems, humanity has learned little.
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 Cecelia Bartoli’s voice – and have long harbored a secret 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 recently, 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, so now that I was on a mission, I turned to that first and selected several poems to set. Working in my usual way with poetry in a language other than English, I looked to see if I could find any videos on-line of someone reading the poems, so that I could hear the phrasing and rhythms of the spoken poems. Because I could not find several that were in my little book, ultimately I selected four poems, some from the book, some not, that I was able to listen to, while parsing syllables and scribbling accent marks down on the page. Poems by Cavalcanti, Petrarca, Stampa and Tasso.
STONE AND 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.
