Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments Artistic Supervision: Michael Pinkerton Recording, Mixing, Mastering: C-Arts Classical Arts - Michael Waldegg & Harald Hajek Recorded January 7, 8, 11 & 12, 2016, Kaisersaal, Vienna, Austria Cover Photo: Stephen Mazujian Partial Funding for this recording comes from the Faculty Development Fund at The Hartt School, The University of Hartford CD Notes: Dr. Kerry Ginger and other works by American composers Publishers Robert Barefield, baritone Virgil Thomson: G. Schirmer, Inc; Charles Ives: Merion Music, Inc.; Theodore Chanler: Carolyn Hague, piano G. Schirmer, Inc.; Scott Wheeler: Scott Wheeler Music; Marion Bauer: Night in the Woods & A Parable – The Blade of Grass (G. Schirmer, Inc.); Only of Thee & Me & Phillis songs by (Arthur P. Schmidt, Inc.); The Epitaph of a Butterfly (Oliver Ditson Company) Marion Bauer Theodore Chanler Charles Ives WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1625 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 Virgil Thomson TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. Scott Wheeler BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2016 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Virgil Thomson (1896-1989): Mostly about Love Songs To Fill The Void Influential critic and composer Virgil Thomson is best known for his two operatic works on librettos by This collection of American art song honors two intensely personal yet universal Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). Mostly about Love is aspects of the human experience: love and loss. In entire cultures and in individual the product of a two-year artistic partnership between Thomson and poet Kenneth Koch, which began in 1958 with the premise of creating another opera. Although the collaboration ended suddenly, the lives, loss brings both grief and the opportunity for rebirth. Art, with its unique ebullient Mostly about Love was a happy result. Koch later reflected on his brief relationship with capacity to articulate essential truths about human existence, is a powerful response Thomson, “I had a good ride even though I ended up back in the garage.” Thomson’s own writings, to the destruction of death and the vulnerability of pain. The artists featured here however, underscore the hallowed role of music-making in his life, and in the human experience as a each treat a different facet of life—from earthly joy, to contemplation of the divine, whole: “Musicians working together, hearing together, feeling together, and projecting together, that is the miracle, the experience we prize above all others.” to heady courtship, to the agony of bereavement—but each provides testament that The songs of Mostly about Love reflect Thomson’s famed attention to text setting, which renders poetry and music, the fruits of the creative impulse, are death’s very antithesis. each of these snapshots a natural-sounding monologue with incidental musical features. After all, The centerpiece of this program, Scott Wheeler’s Songs to Fill the Void, is the Thomson considered himself a servant to the text, and his use of musical gesture enhances the character of each oration effectively and efficiently. From the wit of “Love Song” to the exhilaration result of a yearlong collaboration between the composer and poet-vocalist Robert of “Let’s Take a Walk” to the furtive hope of “A Prayer to Saint Catherine,” Thomson’s musical settings Barefield. Barefield’s intimate poetry commemorates his beloved partner, Stephen of Koch’s unpredictable poetry affirm its core truth: “We live because we love.” Mazujian, who passed away in early 2014, while the two vacationed in Cambodia. Even as the poems chronicle Steve’s passing, and the empty space he left behind, Charles Ives (1874-1954): Five Songs they weave a rich tapestry of recollection, contemplation, and deep love. Uniting all Harmony Ives wrote to her husband in 1908, of these elements is music, a “shared language” in the lives of these two men and Inspiration ought to come fullest at life’s happiest moments… but I don’t the medium that now gives full expression to Barefield’s words. believe it’s often done—I think inspiration—in art—seems to be almost a consolation in hours of sadness or loneliness & that most happy moments Death plays an integral role in the human experience. So too, however, does that are put into expression after they have been memories & made doubly which it throws into relief: hope, strength, faith, and above all, love. These songs precious because they are gone. elucidate the profound relationships between humanity’s darkest chapters and its These five songs by Charles Ives—a pioneer of musical modernism and champion of the sweetest hours, between nature’s hard realities and its peaceful solace, between the American musical tradition—reflect the yearning to which Harmony alludes: yearning for rest, mundane and the eternal. Ultimately, these pieces remind us of music’s ineffable for comfort, and for that which is past. In these settings, all drawn from Ives’s monumental 1922 collection, 114 Songs, nature emerges as the great comforter and the lens through which one might capacity to inspire, immortalize, and heal. glimpse the eternal. Ilmenau When Stars are in the Quiet Skies Johann Wilhelm von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote Wanderers Nachtlied II just outside the German resort The poet of When Stars are in the Quiet Skies, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, is perhaps best known town of Ilmenau, a pastoral, woodsy setting rivaling that of New England’s Walden Pond. Goethe’s for the incipit of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night.” In music, however, poem, which has since been set over 85 times—most famously by Franz Schubert in 1815—appears his legacy is far grander: his works were the basis for Wagner’s Rienzi (1842) and what is widely here in an English translation by Harmony Ives. Goethe’s brief words capture elegantly that most considered the first American opera, William Henry Fry’s Leonora (1846). Bulwer-Lytton’s “When Romantic of preoccupations: gestillte Sehnsucht, or the promise of fulfilled longing. Ives matches Stars” highlights the interrelatedness of the sacred and the interpersonal. As the poet longs for his Goethe’s literary Romanticism with a setting in a simple, Romantic musical idiom. Occasional “guiding star” under the cover of night, it is unclear whether he speaks to a celestial body or a loved chromatic inflections remind the listener of that which remains, as yet, unfulfilled. one; ultimately, we feel that they are one and the same, the hallowed communion between human My Native Land souls suggesting something of the divine. Ives’s setting of My Native Land, an anonymous translation of a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), reflects the ambivalence of the original text while departing from it substantially. Heine’s poem, “Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland,” casts the very notion of home into doubt with its bitter refrain, “Es Scott Wheeler (b. 1952): Songs to Fill the Void war ein Traum.” Ives mitigates Heine’s ironic tone with a wistful setting that at times calls to mind Robert Barefield and Carolyn Hague contacted renowned Robert Schumann’s gentle, lyrical Eusebius. Ives’s chosen translation also adds an uplifting second American composer Scott Wheeler in early 2015 to explore the verse that allows for the possibility of returning to one’s past, in dreams. possibility of a commission honoring Barefield’s late partner, Steve. The recipient of numerous awards and commissions, A Night Song Scott Wheeler has received the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Published as part of the Sentimental Ballads, a subset of the 114 Songs, A Night Song breathes the Music Society of Lincoln Center and is the 2014 winner of exhilaration of stolen nighttime kisses in musical language evocative of both Stephen Foster and Ives’s the Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts transatlantic fellow folklorist, Ralph Vaughan Williams. The lighthearted text by Irish poet Thomas and Letters, as well as commissions from the Guggenheim Moore (1779-1853) at once celebrates new love and the borrowed nature of our time here on Earth. Foundation and the Metropolitan Opera. His music has been At the River recorded on BMOP Sound, Albany Records, Naxos, and Newport Known for incorporating folk material in his art music, Ives borrowed Robert Lowry’s hymn, The Classics and has received performances throughout the United Beautiful River, for the third movement of his Fourth Violin Sonata, subtitled Children’s Day at the States, China, Europe, and Canada. He is on the faculty at Camp Meeting (1914-1916). Around the same time, he composed this setting of the hymn for voice Emerson College and a founding member of the new-music ensemble Dinosaur Annex. The result of and piano, keeping some of the Sonata’s hallmark traits—most notably, its repetition of the probing Wheeler and Barefield’s collaboration is this triptych, which combines Barefield’s achingly intimate first line at the end of the song. Ives’s inclusion of this characteristic “unanswered question” reflects texts with Wheeler’s captivating musical language, praised for its warmth, clarity, and lyricism. both the hope and uncertainty of the human experience. Ultimately, the intermittent earnestness and Wheeler, who shares the gift of prosody with his onetime teacher, Virgil Thomson, complements playfulness of the song affirm the tenacity of the human spirit in the face of adversity and loss. Barefield’s poetry with a depth of feeling that transcends words alone. Angkor Wat A Shepherd This first song is an intensely personal account of the circumstances surrounding Steve’s death. As In this epitaph, Chanler uses a deliberately simple, harmonically open palate as a backdrop for an austere the narrative progresses, the musical setting illuminates different facets of the story: the ornamental shepherd’s melody.