SONGS OF LOVE AND LOSS AFTER 60 DE 3548 1 MORTALITY MANSIONS: SONGS OF LOVE AND LOSS AFTER 60 AND LOSS MANSIONS: SONGS OF LOVE MORTALITY MORTALITY MANSIONS: SONGS OF LOVE AND LOSS AFTER 60 AND LOSS MANSIONS: SONGS OF LOVE MORTALITY Grammy-winning composer Herschel Garfein and former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall create a vivid and moving eleven-song cycle set in late life. Tenor Michael Slattery and pianist Dimitri Dover lead this spirited journey in song, which starts at age sixty with contented domesticity and sexual fulfillment, only to pass through harrowing confrontations with death before arriving at a transcendent recognition of love’s redemptive power. A touching reversed perspective comes with the concluding song, Otherwise, a setting of a poem by Hall’s deceased wife, Jane Kenyon. The 89-year-old Hall reading his poems lends personal and historical significance. The liner notes are by David Hajdu, three-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing. Michael Slattery, tenor Herschel Garfein, music Donald Hall, texts Dimitri Dover, piano Otherwise text by Jane Kenyon Marnie Breckenridge, soprano • Donald Hall, reader Produced by Herschel Garfein and Kabir Sehgal SONGS OF LOVE AND LOSS AFTER 60 SONG CYCLE INTERLUDE: READINGS 1 When the Young Husband 3:45 12 When the Young Husband 3:06 2 When I Was Young 3:23 13 When I Was Young 1:11 3 Woolworth's 3:07 14 Woolworth's 1:11 4 The Green Shelf 3:12 15 The Green Shelf 1:19 5 Fête 1:11 16 Fête 0:29 6 The Young Watch Us 3:09 17 The Young Watch Us 0:46 7 Summer Kitchen 5:08 18 Summer Kitchen 0:58 8 Dying Is Simple, She Said 3:59 19 Dying Is Simple, She Said 1:12 9 Deathwork 2:52 20 Deathwork 1:14 10 Freezes and Junes 3:04 21 Freezes and Junes 0:47 DELOS DE 3548 DELOS 11 Gold 4:36 22 Gold 1:10 DE 3548 DELOS EPILOGUE 23 Otherwise 5:53 © 2018 Delos Productions, Inc., P.O. Box 343, Sonoma, CA 95476-9998 Total Playing TIme: 56:48 (800) 364-0645 • (707) 996-3844 [email protected] • www.delosmusic.com A SONG CYCLE Music by Herschel Garfein Texts by Donald Hall Michael Slattery, tenor Dimitri Dover, piano 1 When the Young Husband 3:45 2 When I Was Young 3:23 3 Woolworth's 3:07 4 The Green Shelf 3:12 5 Fête 1:11 6 The Young Watch Us 3:09 7 Summer Kitchen 5:08 8 Dying Is Simple, She Said 3:59 9 Deathwork 2:52 10 Freezes and Junes 3:04 11 Gold 4:36 2 Music by Herschel Garfein Music by Herschel Garfein Poems by Donald Hall Text by Jane Kenyon Donald Hall, reader Marnie Breckenridge, soprano Dimitri Dover, piano Dimitri Dover, piano 12 When the Young Husband 3:06 23 Otherwise 5:53 13 When I Was Young 1:11 Total Playing Time: 56:48 14 Woolworth's 1:11 15 The Green Shelf 1:19 16 Fête 0:29 17 The Young Watch Us 0:46 18 Summer Kitchen 0:58 19 Dying Is Simple, She Said 1:12 20 Deathwork 1:14 21 Freezes and Junes 0:47 22 Gold 1:10 3 Two arts performed together illuminate each other. A poem printed on a broadside, designed by a master, adds exquisite shape to exquisite language. The greatest poetic enhancement happens when a brilliant composer sets good poems to music. I am deeply grateful for Herschel Garfein’s Mortality Mansions, where he turns my poems into song, elevating my images as Michael Slattery’s golden tenor joins Dimitri Dover’s brilliant pianism. The poem by my late wife, Jane Kenyon, is sung glowingly by Marnie Breckenridge. For me, poetry has always centered on its sound. Reading poems in silence, I hear them with my mouth. Three syllables like “dark barn door” are delicious even before they turn wood- en and shadowy. When Herschel embellishes my lines by his music, he exalts one rapture by means of another. Perched in my blue chair, I am spellbound as I listen to his art transcend the language of my invention. From the first syllables to the last, maybe most gloriously in “Gold,” we are swept through art’s grandeur into the final achievement of unblemished silence. Donald Hall 4 5 Michael Slattery tenor Dimitri Dover piano 6 Herschel Garfein composer Marnie Breckenridge soprano 7 EARLY DRAFT OF DONALD HALL’S “GOLD” 8 EARLY SKETCH OF HERSCHEL GARFEIN’S “GOLD” 9 The Architecture of Mortality With Mortality Mansions, a song cycle in eleven form, performed, and recorded under Garfein’s parts, the poet Donald Hall and the composer ardent and exacting stewardship. As Hall has Herschel Garfein have done more than make a explained, “What people will experience as work of boldly complicated, thrillingly emotive Mortality Mansions does not resemble a book literary/musical art. They of poems or a program have performed a public of poems. It has a kind of service, providing the au- wholeness of its own. It is dience of the 21st century something I had not had with an alternative narra- in mind when I wrote the tive of eros and aging – a poems. It has a wholeness subversively nuanced and I could never have antici- humane conception that pated or predicted.” defies the gauzy tropes The quality of uni- of Viagra ads and the de- ty that Donald Hall has fensive naughtiness of found unexpectedly in “old-people sex” jokes in Mortality Mansions emer- pop entertainment from ged slowly, over time, as Golden Girls to Grace and Herschel Garfein delved Frankie. In a culture ob- into and experimented Painting of Donald Hall sessed with sexuality and by Michael Slattery with Hall’s poetry. Garfein, youth, Hall and Garfein in addition to his well- grant us the gift of considering late life as real known work as a respected contemporary com- life, in the full richness of its complexities, its poser (the opera Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pleasures, its trials, and its anguishes. Are Dead), librettist (the opera Elmer Gantry, for The work, though derived from the text of which Garfein and composer Robert Aldridge a small selection of poems written over the shared a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary course of Hall’s six-decade-long career, was Classical Composition), and director, also teach- conceived as a song cycle by Garfein and given es a graduate seminar in Script Analysis at the 10 New York University/Steinhardt School of Music lections, a few biographies, and a couple of text- and Performing Arts. He understands writing books. They include enough works with nature of many kinds, as a practitioner of multiple cre- and rural life at their heart to explain the wide- ative arts as well as an educator. Still, he found spread perception of Hall as a poet of the bucol- himself taken aback by the thematic breadth, ic. The Library of Congress, in its announcement the earthy candor, and sheer carnality that he of Hall’s appointment as Poet Laureate in June found when he gave Hall’s work his close atten- 2006, quoted former Laureate Billy Collins cate- tion, at the suggestion of a friend. gorizing Hall as falling in “the Frostian tradition “Like a lot of people, I suppose, I had a limited of the plainspoken rural poet” and made a point understanding of what his work is about, based to note that Hall lived “on an old family farm in on the way he is generally described – that is, as rural New Hampshire, in the house where his a New Hampshire poet, a rural poet in the mold grandmother and his mother were born.” of Robert Frost, with whom he had apparently Among the surprises Garfein found in Hall’s studied when he was young. He didn’t sound poetry was abounding evidence that Hall has particularly interesting to me,” Garfein recalls. often been less interested in acts of birth, wher- Reading through the judiciously curated Hall ever they have taken place, than he has been collection White Apples and the Taste of Stone in the act of conception. “He’s brilliantly horny (2006), he thought, “Wow – everything I’ve – or he has been in so much of his poetry, par- heard about this man’s work is pretty unfair. For ticularly his late work,” Garfein notes, drawing somebody as well known and respected as he is, special attention to the robust body of poems this man is not well understood at all.” Hall wrote during or in memory of his 20-year Donald Hall, 89 at the time of this album’s marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. release, has been writing poetry since his teens With its first piece, 1 "When the Young in the 1940s and had his first collection of po- Husband,” Mortality Mansions immerses the lis- ems, Exiles and Marriages, published in 1955, tener in the world of Donald Hall’s mind, heart, three years before Herschel Garfein was born. and body, a sphere where the three states of be- By virtue of both his prolificacy and longevity, ing tend to coexist in tenuous equilibrium, but he has produced a full bookcase of works in sometimes clash with destructive force. Garfein many forms: more than 20 collections of poetry, sets up the song’s theme of treacherous carnal a dozen-plus books for young readers, several impulse with a finger-snapping Rat Pack motif, memoirs, books of essays, plays, short story col- played with wry surety by the pianist Dimitri 11 Dover, and the singer Michael Slattery brings a are entwined with in the deepest ways – emo- subtly unsettling dose of male bravura to the tionally, intellectually, and physically – know- song’s story of a newly married man on his way ing, all the while, that death could be around to an afternoon tryst that, in the end, damages the corner and will, finally, come.