Various Artists - Du Bout Des Yeux - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The American composer William Bolcom (b. 1938) is best-known for his large-scale setting of William Blake's InchSongs of Innocence and Experience,Inch which is available on a 3-CD Naxos set. This new collection of Bolcom's songs also on Naxos shows the composers's lifelong fascination with Blake. It includes an early lyrical setting of Blake's poem, InchMaryInch which deals with a beautiful and intelligent young woman and her rejection by her society. In the several torch and cabaret-style works it includes, the collection also shows Bolcom's attempts to fuse classical with popular styles of music. Bolcom also has done so in his piano music, much of which is heavily influenced by ragtime. The songs on this CD are performed and selected by soprano Carole Farley with Bolcom himself at the piano.

Acclaimed for it's 'rhythmic verve, spontaneity and riot of splendid colors' (Pizzicato magazine on Giovanni Picchi's Canzoni da Sonar con ogni sorte d'istromenti), Concerto Scirocco now immerses itself in the English musical scene of the Elizabethan era, and more especially the genres of the masque and the fantasia. Great cultural ferment swept through England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The courts invested huge sums of money in the production of 'masques', entertainments combining music, dance, theatre and stage design in a sumptuous display of grandeur. At the same time, the first public playhouses were founded in the suburban districts of London The Theatre, the Red Lion, the Rose, the Swan, and in 1599 Shakespeare's Globe. Music played a key role in accompanying this eccentric burst of cultural vitality the asymmetrical fantasias of John Hilton, the monumental canzonas and pavanes of William Brade, the impudent, rhetorical masques of Robert Johnson and others, reveal an era of unparalleled musical invention and exploration.

Various Artists - Music / Various [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/23/2002