Carollo / Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra - Music from the Ethereal Side of Paradise - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Composer Michael Murray's album PASSAGES brings the words of iconic 19th and 20th century poets to life through stirring music for solo soprano and instruments. Murray has selected poetry from the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Walt Whitman, with poems detailing childhood adventure, hope, and tragedy. Celebrated soprano Genevieve Fulks performs throughout; most of the music heard on the album was written specifically with her voice in mind. Murray's music has been lauded for it's meticulously crafted yet ultimately approachable style. Through familiar themes and time-honored poetry, Murray invites listeners to engage with, and even be challenged by, this collection of thoughtful compositions.

Album Tracks 1. The Rhetoric and Mythos of Belief 2. The Transfiguration of Giovanni Baudino 3. Let Freedom Ring 4. Do You Have An E.R. for Music? 5. Symphony No. 2 (The Circle of Fire) 6. Move Towards the Light (Your Destiny Awaits You)

Sergio Cervetti, born in Uruguay, immigrated to the United States in 1962 to study contemporary composition, and his work contains a certain cosmopolitan quality reflective of his past and present. Although essentially a minimalist since 1970, he has branched out to embrace and incorporate diverse elements from a variety of aesthetics. Ever-present is the nexus of nature and science, of the mundane and the miraculous. Et in Arcadia ego is, most of all, the invocation of a childhood memory. Inspired by an adventurous journey to the island reserve Martín García off the coast of Uruguay, which Cervetti undertook as a young boy of only 7, it illustrates the traveler's awe at reaching a paradisiacal shore. The composer found himself struck with the same sensation years later on the other side of the world, in France, while viewing Nicolas Poussin's Baroque painting of the same name at the Louvre. Both the painting and the musical work present the paradox of not only death within paradise, but death's vital role in the renewal of life. This meditation on mortality is almost religious in nature and thus sets the stage for Consolamentum, an homage to the Cathar and Albigensian martyrs who suffered persecution by the Catholic Church in 12th-century Southern France. The title alludes to the unique, somewhat mystified sacrament of the former, which was considered an immersion in the Holy Spirit and supposed to bring about absolution from all sin. Plexus, on the other hand, takes the listener back to the realm of science. The minimalist, aleatoric composition mimics a branching network of nerves, being, in it's own right, an intricate microcosm of structure and sound. Cervetti truly shines in this finale, with the impressively complex, fractal structures eventually thinning out to a mere whisper. Album Tracks 1. Et in Arcadia Ego (2017) 2. Consolamentum (2016) 3. Plexus