Laura van der Heijden - Pohadka - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In this unique Delos album, two-time Grammy Award-winning composer, librettist, and producer Herschel Garfein introduces Mortality Mansions a stunning new song cycle setting poems by former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall. Hall's plain-spoken, yet profound poetry reveals his candid perspectives on aging, with it's inevitable physical decline, fears, personal losses, and emotional trials. Yet he balances these negative aspects with such persisting joys and pleasures as loving companionship and physical intimacy. Garfein's music effectively envelops Hall's verses like a glove, illuminating their attendant moods, potent emotions, and stark verbal imagery. The album includes an interlude of Hall's readings of his poetry, and ends with a memorable epilogue Garfein's pensive setting of a moving poem by Jane Kenyon, Hall's late wife. Tenor Michael Slattery performs the song cycle brilliantly, and soprano Marnie Breckenridge interprets the epilogue to devastating effect. Exceptional piano collaboration comes courtesy of Dimitri Dover.

The performers write 'Selecting the repertoire for our album Path to the Moon, we wanted to explore a number of possibilities for binding together a programme. To place different works alongside one another is a wonderful way of bringing out new and unusual qualities in each piece. William T. Horton's fantastic image The Path to the Moon immediately inspired a flurry of ideas, including works on the subjects of both night and the moon, as well as pieces which invoke the exploratory nature of humankind's voyage to the moon. Britten wrote his Sonata for Cello and Piano only two years after the first object made by humans had touched the surface of the moon, in 1959. Humans throughout history and from all cultures have been drawn to and taken inspiration from the moon and we have tried to reflect this in our eclectic choice of song repertoire from Toru Takemitsu to Nina Simone and from Lili Boulanger to Florence Price. As we hope you will hear on this album, Walker's Cello Sonata rings with echoes of the sound-worlds of blues and jazz and is infused with a beautiful lyricism. We really believe that Walker's Cello Sonata deserves to become a staple of the chamber music repertoire and are absolutely thrilled to offer you a recording of it in the context of our own exploration of a path to the moon.'

The Tony Award-winning play, written by Warren Leight, is set in New York City between the years of 1953 and 1985, and it chronicles the life and lifestyle of a jazz trumpeter, exploring the creative forces which drive a musician and binds him ever closer to his fellow jazzmen while tearing his own family apart. It's a wonderful play, and the cast and crew for this productions are all brilliant. The interesting thing about this production is the use of a newly-recorded score (as opposed to the Inchneedle dropInch scoring solution used in previous productions of the show in New York and elsewhere), and I was very lucky to get the call from director Andy Robinson to write the music. Be-bop lives! Peter Erskine scored the production with a jazz quintet. The WDR Big Band also makes a guest appearance.