Barihunk Chart Topper; Great Gatsby in SF; Andrew Garland for Valentine's Day: Meikle Takes Marcello to Italy
David McFerrin (Top L), David Adam Moore (Bottom L) & Jesse Blumberg (R)
A little over two weeks ago we mentioned the CD release party and concert for the Five Borough Music Festival's songbook of works by twenty composers. Each song was inspired by places, themes, and poetry from every corner of New York City. We're thrilled to announce that the CD has shot up the Classical Billboard charts to #12 ahead of the Metropolitan Opera and Sir Paul McCartney. Barihunks David Adam Moore, Jesse Blumberg and David McFerrin are all featured on the CD.
Composers include Lisa Bielawa, Tom Cipullo, Mohammed Fairouz, Ricky Ian Gordon, Daron Hagen, Gabriel Kahane, Jorge Martin, Russell Platt, Matt Schickele and more. Click HERE to buy your copy today.
CONGRATULATIONS to everyone involved!
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Another Five Borough Songbook review
The Five Borough Songbook - The Show and the Recording
Last year I attended the Queens, NY, premiere of the "Five Borough Songbook," a collection of 20 songs commissioned from 20 composers by the Five Boroughs Music Festival. A few weeks ago, I attended the Manhattan premiere - the same twenty songs, but a slightly different mix of singers. I was curious to hear this music a second time, having been so impressed on first hearing. So on January 12 I was in the auditorium at Baruch College in Manhattan, not only to hear the live performances but also to pick up the recording, which was released that day (and since the release has quickly climbed to number 12 on the Billboard classical list).
This is not a "live in concert" recording. Instead, taking the collection of 20 songs as a starting point, producers Glen Roven (one of the participating composers), Peter Fitzgerald, Richard Cohen, and Megan Henninger took the musicians into the Sound Associates studio during October and November, dividing up some of the songs between people who had sung them at the Brooklyn premiere and the Queens premiere (since there were cast changes between the two shows) and also involving 5BMF Artistic Director Jesse Blumberg (a noted baritone) in some of the performances even though he hadn't sung in the two concerts. The results are splendid.
Each of the composers was asked to come up with a text to set. Some looked through available published poetry, others reached out to poets for new text or devised their own. The unifying factor was that the Five Borough Songbook was not just composed by individuals who live or work in the City of New York, but would also provide musical settings for texts that somehow had something to do with New York City, the "something to do" being loosely defined. Several of the songs relate to the subway system, which is surely one of the defining features of New York. Others focus on particular places, from Times Square to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island to Coney Island Avenue. Others relate experiences, incidents, or feelings associated by the poets and/or the composers with New York. There is even some "found text," such as Lisa Bielawa's song "Breakfast in New York" which sets snippets of conversation she would overhear and jot down while eating breakfast in her favorite Queens diner.
There's even something in here for my own specialized collection of musical settings of The Psalms, as Yotam Haber set a poem by Julia Kasdorf which is based on Psalm 137 in his song "On Leaving Brooklyn."
The composers also ranged from well-established people with international reputations to those with more localized fame. In some cases this marked my first exposure to music by these composers, while in other cases I am very familiar with the work. But despite this range of reputation and experience, I thought the entire collection achieved a uniformly high standard of inspiration and quality.
With twenty different composers, there are also a wide variety of musical styles on display, demonstrating a melange of influences from Broadway to the highest of high art songs. Two things noticeably missing, however, are atonality or serial music. All of these songs sound to me like they have a tonal center, and most seemed concerned with inventing and developing lyrical lines. The enunciation of the singers is so fine and the audio engineering is so well done that one can pick up just about all the text without having to look at a printed version, but this release is also excellent in providing complete texts in the insert booklet, something that one can't necessarily count on when purchasing vocal recitals on independent labels. (This is a production of GPR Records.) (The booklet cover provides two appropriate NYC scenes, one of an MTA train, of course.... The only thing missing that would have been useful are bios of the composers and performers.)
It remains, for purposes of Google accessibility, for me to list the artists involved with this superb production. The composers are Christopher Berg, Lisa Bielawa, Tom Cipullo, Christina Courtin, Mohammed Fairouz, Renee Favand-See, John Glover, Ricky Ian Gordon, Yotam Haber, Daron Hagen, Martin Hennessy, Gabriel Kahane, Gilda Lyons, Jorge Martin, Russell Platt, Glen Roven, Matt Schickele, Richard Pearson Thomas, Christopher Tignor, and Scott Wheeler.
The singers are: Tenors Javier Abreu, Keith Jameson and Alex Richardson; Sopranos Mireille Asselin and Martha Guth; Mezzo-Sopranos Meg Bragle and Blythe Gaissert; Baritones Jesse Blumberg, Scott Dispensa, David McFerrin and David Adam Moore. Violinist Harumi Rhodes and Pianists Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck collaborate with the singers. The pieces range from unaccompanied singing to "choral" numbers involving the entire cast at any given performance. On the recording, the songs have been arranged to present a coherent and entertaining cycle varying vocal types and instrumental participants in a way that keeps things fresh and exciting.
Favorite songs from among those presented? It would be invidious to single any out, since having heard two complete performances and listened to most of the recording twice, I have to say there is not one dud in the bunch. Every song is interesting and entertaining or moving or stimulating in its own way, and they are all worth hearing.
I hope that there can also be a sheet music publication, or at least a downloadable version of the sheet music, because this Songbook would be a wonderful source of individual numbers for singers to take up in their song recitals. There is something in here for most vocal ranges, and quite a few that limit themselves to piano accompaniment, making them more easy to integrate into a general song recital. (Perhaps in a publication of the music the composers could adapt their compositions so that all could be performed with piano accompaniment, but that would definitely undermine the distinctive flavor of some, especially those that used the violin rather than the piano as the sole instrumental collaborator.) Several of these songs would make dandy encores, and it would certainly be possible for any singer wishing to include a selection of NYC-related songs to make up a fine "suite" extracted from the book. Indeed, I can imagine an entertaining suite made up of just the subway songs...
Last year I attended the Queens, NY, premiere of the "Five Borough Songbook," a collection of 20 songs commissioned from 20 composers by the Five Boroughs Music Festival. A few weeks ago, I attended the Manhattan premiere - the same twenty songs, but a slightly different mix of singers. I was curious to hear this music a second time, having been so impressed on first hearing. So on January 12 I was in the auditorium at Baruch College in Manhattan, not only to hear the live performances but also to pick up the recording, which was released that day (and since the release has quickly climbed to number 12 on the Billboard classical list).
This is not a "live in concert" recording. Instead, taking the collection of 20 songs as a starting point, producers Glen Roven (one of the participating composers), Peter Fitzgerald, Richard Cohen, and Megan Henninger took the musicians into the Sound Associates studio during October and November, dividing up some of the songs between people who had sung them at the Brooklyn premiere and the Queens premiere (since there were cast changes between the two shows) and also involving 5BMF Artistic Director Jesse Blumberg (a noted baritone) in some of the performances even though he hadn't sung in the two concerts. The results are splendid.
Each of the composers was asked to come up with a text to set. Some looked through available published poetry, others reached out to poets for new text or devised their own. The unifying factor was that the Five Borough Songbook was not just composed by individuals who live or work in the City of New York, but would also provide musical settings for texts that somehow had something to do with New York City, the "something to do" being loosely defined. Several of the songs relate to the subway system, which is surely one of the defining features of New York. Others focus on particular places, from Times Square to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island to Coney Island Avenue. Others relate experiences, incidents, or feelings associated by the poets and/or the composers with New York. There is even some "found text," such as Lisa Bielawa's song "Breakfast in New York" which sets snippets of conversation she would overhear and jot down while eating breakfast in her favorite Queens diner.
There's even something in here for my own specialized collection of musical settings of The Psalms, as Yotam Haber set a poem by Julia Kasdorf which is based on Psalm 137 in his song "On Leaving Brooklyn."
The composers also ranged from well-established people with international reputations to those with more localized fame. In some cases this marked my first exposure to music by these composers, while in other cases I am very familiar with the work. But despite this range of reputation and experience, I thought the entire collection achieved a uniformly high standard of inspiration and quality.
With twenty different composers, there are also a wide variety of musical styles on display, demonstrating a melange of influences from Broadway to the highest of high art songs. Two things noticeably missing, however, are atonality or serial music. All of these songs sound to me like they have a tonal center, and most seemed concerned with inventing and developing lyrical lines. The enunciation of the singers is so fine and the audio engineering is so well done that one can pick up just about all the text without having to look at a printed version, but this release is also excellent in providing complete texts in the insert booklet, something that one can't necessarily count on when purchasing vocal recitals on independent labels. (This is a production of GPR Records.) (The booklet cover provides two appropriate NYC scenes, one of an MTA train, of course.... The only thing missing that would have been useful are bios of the composers and performers.)
It remains, for purposes of Google accessibility, for me to list the artists involved with this superb production. The composers are Christopher Berg, Lisa Bielawa, Tom Cipullo, Christina Courtin, Mohammed Fairouz, Renee Favand-See, John Glover, Ricky Ian Gordon, Yotam Haber, Daron Hagen, Martin Hennessy, Gabriel Kahane, Gilda Lyons, Jorge Martin, Russell Platt, Glen Roven, Matt Schickele, Richard Pearson Thomas, Christopher Tignor, and Scott Wheeler.
The singers are: Tenors Javier Abreu, Keith Jameson and Alex Richardson; Sopranos Mireille Asselin and Martha Guth; Mezzo-Sopranos Meg Bragle and Blythe Gaissert; Baritones Jesse Blumberg, Scott Dispensa, David McFerrin and David Adam Moore. Violinist Harumi Rhodes and Pianists Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck collaborate with the singers. The pieces range from unaccompanied singing to "choral" numbers involving the entire cast at any given performance. On the recording, the songs have been arranged to present a coherent and entertaining cycle varying vocal types and instrumental participants in a way that keeps things fresh and exciting.
Favorite songs from among those presented? It would be invidious to single any out, since having heard two complete performances and listened to most of the recording twice, I have to say there is not one dud in the bunch. Every song is interesting and entertaining or moving or stimulating in its own way, and they are all worth hearing.
I hope that there can also be a sheet music publication, or at least a downloadable version of the sheet music, because this Songbook would be a wonderful source of individual numbers for singers to take up in their song recitals. There is something in here for most vocal ranges, and quite a few that limit themselves to piano accompaniment, making them more easy to integrate into a general song recital. (Perhaps in a publication of the music the composers could adapt their compositions so that all could be performed with piano accompaniment, but that would definitely undermine the distinctive flavor of some, especially those that used the violin rather than the piano as the sole instrumental collaborator.) Several of these songs would make dandy encores, and it would certainly be possible for any singer wishing to include a selection of NYC-related songs to make up a fine "suite" extracted from the book. Indeed, I can imagine an entertaining suite made up of just the subway songs...
Monday, January 23, 2012
Opera Obsession Five Boroughs Review
OPERA OBSESSION
MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2012
Not just Broadway's lullaby: Five Borough Songbook
The Five Boroughs Music Festival is an undertaking to which I'm admittedly partial. With (mostly) young artists, a wide-ranging repertoire, and lots of enthusiasm, their self-appointed mission is to bring creative classical programming to all of NYC. Loud cheers from this outer-borough blogger. Their latest project has been the commissioning of twenty songs, from twenty different composers, celebrating the city's architecture, history, and inhabitants... and even, wryly, its transit system. This has given rise not only to an acclaimed concert series, but also the festival's first recording.
I was a bit apprehensive about the coherence of such a deliberately kaleidoscopic project, but the aural odyssey through so many styles proves to be as oddly hypnotic as watching the pieces of colored glass fall into seemingly inexhaustible combinations. This approach to creating the songbook ensures discoveries for any listener, but also that these discoveries may be different for each. My own tastes inclined towards the rich texts of poets re-focused through their lean, contemporary settings (there is Whitman, of course, but also Auden and, to my delight, Julia Kasdorf for Yotam Haber's "On Leaving Brooklyn.") There are also, though, delights in Lisa Bielawa's "Breakfast in New York," which feels like a compressed song cycle, the setting of conversations overheard in the city's diners.
The strange metamorphoses of metaphor can be traced from a couple finding "all the Eden earth affords" in Scott Wheeler's "At Home in Staten Island" to the subway rider seeking escape from eternal significance in Glen Roven's evocative "F from DUMBO." Perhaps the recording's most endearing characteristic is its willingness to joyously hymn everything from tourist-thronged Times Square (Richard Pearson Thomas, "The Center of the Universe") to the particular pleasures of a New York neighborhood. Yes, even--no, especially--if, as in Gabriel Kahane's "Coney Island Avenue," these comprise "The Chinese laundry, the Puerto Rican fruit stand, / the probably illegal, definitely sketchy / Hasidic copy shop slash passport office." More information on the odes of the songbook's two CDs may be found here.
MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2012
Not just Broadway's lullaby: Five Borough Songbook
The Five Boroughs Music Festival is an undertaking to which I'm admittedly partial. With (mostly) young artists, a wide-ranging repertoire, and lots of enthusiasm, their self-appointed mission is to bring creative classical programming to all of NYC. Loud cheers from this outer-borough blogger. Their latest project has been the commissioning of twenty songs, from twenty different composers, celebrating the city's architecture, history, and inhabitants... and even, wryly, its transit system. This has given rise not only to an acclaimed concert series, but also the festival's first recording.
I was a bit apprehensive about the coherence of such a deliberately kaleidoscopic project, but the aural odyssey through so many styles proves to be as oddly hypnotic as watching the pieces of colored glass fall into seemingly inexhaustible combinations. This approach to creating the songbook ensures discoveries for any listener, but also that these discoveries may be different for each. My own tastes inclined towards the rich texts of poets re-focused through their lean, contemporary settings (there is Whitman, of course, but also Auden and, to my delight, Julia Kasdorf for Yotam Haber's "On Leaving Brooklyn.") There are also, though, delights in Lisa Bielawa's "Breakfast in New York," which feels like a compressed song cycle, the setting of conversations overheard in the city's diners.
The strange metamorphoses of metaphor can be traced from a couple finding "all the Eden earth affords" in Scott Wheeler's "At Home in Staten Island" to the subway rider seeking escape from eternal significance in Glen Roven's evocative "F from DUMBO." Perhaps the recording's most endearing characteristic is its willingness to joyously hymn everything from tourist-thronged Times Square (Richard Pearson Thomas, "The Center of the Universe") to the particular pleasures of a New York neighborhood. Yes, even--no, especially--if, as in Gabriel Kahane's "Coney Island Avenue," these comprise "The Chinese laundry, the Puerto Rican fruit stand, / the probably illegal, definitely sketchy / Hasidic copy shop slash passport office." More information on the odes of the songbook's two CDs may be found here.
Five Borough Songbook NY TIMES REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW
A Score of Ways to Serenade a City
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Five Borough Songbook From left, Harumi Rhodes, violinist; Martha Guth, soprano; David McFerrin, baritone; Alex Richardson, tenor; and Jamie Van Eyck, mezzo-soprano, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 15, 2012
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The Five Boroughs Music Festival began in 2007 with the idea of presenting concerts all over New York. The festival has no preconceptions about genre: its offerings have included folk music, early music and art song. To celebrate its fifth anniversary the festival commissioned 20 composers to write songs about the city for one to four voices, using texts of their choice (several wrote their own). The resulting “Five Borough Songbook” had its premiere at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn three months ago and made its way to Manhattan on Thursday, to the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
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A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
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With 20 composers involved you might expect every current style to be represented. Quite a few were, though one conspicuous absence was 12-tone or even sharp angularity. Unalloyed minimalism was missing, too, although Yotam Haber uses passing hints of it, along with light but insistent dissonances, in “On Leaving Brooklyn,” a haunting ensemble treatment of Julia Kasdorf’s updating of Psalm 137.
Mr. Haber’s work was the program’s most experimental piece, though inventive approaches to taking the city’s pulse were plentiful. For several composers, that pulse was best taken on the subway. In “F From Dumbo,” Glen Roven mimics a handful of train rhythms in his piano writing, and Gilda Lyons transforms acronyms, route numbers and letters and a listing of transit-authority service changes into a comic soprano and mezzo-soprano duet, “rapid transit.” Tom Cipullo marshals the four singers for a blunt comic piece about the depredations of one route in “G Is for Grimy: An Ode to the G Train.”
Lisa Bielawa uses snippets of overheard conversation in “Breakfast in New York,” a melodic vocal quartet with an inviting, detailed violin accompaniment. And Richard Pearson Thomas captures the dizzying bustle of the city in the vigorous, tongue-in-cheek patter of “Center of the Universe.”
Wry observation is a crucial undercurrent in this collection, but so is wistfulness. Gabriel Kahane’s energetic “Coney Island Avenue” and Renée Favand-See’s alluringly chromatic “Looking West on a Humid Summer Evening” treat motley sections of Brooklyn with a warmth that evokes Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Matt Schickele is similarly nostalgic in “Days Afield on Staten Island,” a lively, counterpoint-rich setting of an 1892 poem by William Thompson Davis, and Christopher Tignor’s exquisitely harmonized evocation of longing, in “Secret Assignation,” is one of the set’s purely musical highlights.
Mohammed Fairouz’s “Refugee Blues” is an arresting, self-contained melting pot: it begins with Middle Eastern modal writing and moves decisively into Western melody, with driven rhythms that convey the shape (metrically and emotionally) of that dark Auden poem.
Jorge Martín’s “City of Orgies, Walks, and Joys!” matches Whitman’s paean to Manhattan with a bluesy, Gershwin-esque melody. Other pop styles make brief appearances. The barest flicker of jazz illuminates “The City of Love,” Martin Hennessy’s languid setting of Claude McKay’s poem, and Scott Wheeler borrows an old English ballad style for his take on another McKay poem, “At Home in Staten Island.” Folkish directness also drives Christina Courtin’s “Fresh Kills,” a pained look at a landfill.
Ricky Ian Gordon, whose “O City of Ships” (based on Whitman poem) opened the program, draws on a theatrical style. Others — Daron Aric Hagen, Russell Platt John Glover and Christopher Berg — take a more straightforward art-song approach.
The singers — Martha Guth, soprano; Jamie Van Eyck, mezzo-soprano; Alex Richardson, tenor; and David McFerrin, baritone — were strong individually and made a finely balanced ensemble. The violinist Harumi Rhodes and the pianists Jocelyn Dueck and Thomas Bagwell were solid, colorful accompanists.
A Score of Ways to Serenade a City
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Five Borough Songbook From left, Harumi Rhodes, violinist; Martha Guth, soprano; David McFerrin, baritone; Alex Richardson, tenor; and Jamie Van Eyck, mezzo-soprano, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 15, 2012
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REPRINTS
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The Five Boroughs Music Festival began in 2007 with the idea of presenting concerts all over New York. The festival has no preconceptions about genre: its offerings have included folk music, early music and art song. To celebrate its fifth anniversary the festival commissioned 20 composers to write songs about the city for one to four voices, using texts of their choice (several wrote their own). The resulting “Five Borough Songbook” had its premiere at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn three months ago and made its way to Manhattan on Thursday, to the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.
Go to Arts Beat »
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Go to Event Listings »
With 20 composers involved you might expect every current style to be represented. Quite a few were, though one conspicuous absence was 12-tone or even sharp angularity. Unalloyed minimalism was missing, too, although Yotam Haber uses passing hints of it, along with light but insistent dissonances, in “On Leaving Brooklyn,” a haunting ensemble treatment of Julia Kasdorf’s updating of Psalm 137.
Mr. Haber’s work was the program’s most experimental piece, though inventive approaches to taking the city’s pulse were plentiful. For several composers, that pulse was best taken on the subway. In “F From Dumbo,” Glen Roven mimics a handful of train rhythms in his piano writing, and Gilda Lyons transforms acronyms, route numbers and letters and a listing of transit-authority service changes into a comic soprano and mezzo-soprano duet, “rapid transit.” Tom Cipullo marshals the four singers for a blunt comic piece about the depredations of one route in “G Is for Grimy: An Ode to the G Train.”
Lisa Bielawa uses snippets of overheard conversation in “Breakfast in New York,” a melodic vocal quartet with an inviting, detailed violin accompaniment. And Richard Pearson Thomas captures the dizzying bustle of the city in the vigorous, tongue-in-cheek patter of “Center of the Universe.”
Wry observation is a crucial undercurrent in this collection, but so is wistfulness. Gabriel Kahane’s energetic “Coney Island Avenue” and Renée Favand-See’s alluringly chromatic “Looking West on a Humid Summer Evening” treat motley sections of Brooklyn with a warmth that evokes Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Matt Schickele is similarly nostalgic in “Days Afield on Staten Island,” a lively, counterpoint-rich setting of an 1892 poem by William Thompson Davis, and Christopher Tignor’s exquisitely harmonized evocation of longing, in “Secret Assignation,” is one of the set’s purely musical highlights.
Mohammed Fairouz’s “Refugee Blues” is an arresting, self-contained melting pot: it begins with Middle Eastern modal writing and moves decisively into Western melody, with driven rhythms that convey the shape (metrically and emotionally) of that dark Auden poem.
Jorge Martín’s “City of Orgies, Walks, and Joys!” matches Whitman’s paean to Manhattan with a bluesy, Gershwin-esque melody. Other pop styles make brief appearances. The barest flicker of jazz illuminates “The City of Love,” Martin Hennessy’s languid setting of Claude McKay’s poem, and Scott Wheeler borrows an old English ballad style for his take on another McKay poem, “At Home in Staten Island.” Folkish directness also drives Christina Courtin’s “Fresh Kills,” a pained look at a landfill.
Ricky Ian Gordon, whose “O City of Ships” (based on Whitman poem) opened the program, draws on a theatrical style. Others — Daron Aric Hagen, Russell Platt John Glover and Christopher Berg — take a more straightforward art-song approach.
The singers — Martha Guth, soprano; Jamie Van Eyck, mezzo-soprano; Alex Richardson, tenor; and David McFerrin, baritone — were strong individually and made a finely balanced ensemble. The violinist Harumi Rhodes and the pianists Jocelyn Dueck and Thomas Bagwell were solid, colorful accompanists.
FIVE BOROUGH REVIEW FROM OPERA TODAY
23 Jan 2012
Five Boroughs Songbook
What does it say about New York that, in the songs of the city commissioned by the Five Boroughs Music Festival and given performances in Brooklyn, Queens and, now, Manhattan, the poets (often the composers themselves) rarely refer to life in that central part of the city, Rodgers and Hart’s “isle of joy”?
Five Boroughs Songbook
“The Five Boroughs Songbook.” Martha Guth (soprano), Jamie Van Eyck (mezzo-soprano), Alex Richardson (tenor), David McFerrin (baritone), Harumi Rhodes (violin), Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck (piano). Manhattan premiere; Baruch Performing Arts Center, January 12.
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These twenty songs by as many composers are largely concerned with the city as an abstraction, a beloved object, a universal core, or else they address the outer boroughs. Composers, poets, songwriters can no longer afford Manhattan perhaps. They live in Brooklyn’s lovely and not-so-lovely neighborhoods, or in the recuperating Bronx, or even Staten Island. They no longer even dream about Manhattan. Larry Hart wouldn’t recognize the place. Greenwich Village was not mentioned all evening—nor Chinatown, nor Harlem, nor even Inwood. Times Square, in Richard Pearson Thomas’s “The Center of the Universe,” was invoked to “remember the bad old days.” It is no use asking (though I do ask) how much longer New York will be “the center of the country, the world, the universe,” when none of the young, the adventurous, the energetic and creative immigrants can afford to live closer in than Bushwick or Newark.
This has an understandable effect on song output. In the gaudy days of Tin Pan Alley, songwriters stumped for inspiration could look out the window and come up with “Lullaby of Broadway” or “Way Out West on West End Avenue” or “When Love Beckoned on Fifty-Second Street.” But there is no Tin Pan Alley any more. Musically, there’s barely a Broadway. Few of the twenty composers on this program write that kind of theater (at least four of them have composed operas), but on this occasion they often seemed to channel the wisecracking New York wit and the nostalgic art largely missing from Broadway for the last generation. Requested by the Five Boroughs Music Festival to write about some aspect of New York, they have not been parochial in their choice of subject or text—some were old, some were modern, some were the composers themselves. Two of the songs were poems by the ever-exultant Walt Whitman, who retired in New Jersey but drew his universal point of view from his Brooklyn youth.
A lot of numbers in the Songbook boasted rumbling piano accompaniments to symbolize the constant basso continuo throb of the city. There were jazz inflections and dance rhythms, passing in and out of a song as if overheard while ambling by in the darkness. There were songs made up of fragments—fragments of overheard conversations, fragments of overheard melody (Harold Arlen, Giuseppe Verdi), fragments of dying or undying love affairs, fragmentary impressions of Brooklyn on a summer night or the odor of the garbage dumps on Staten Island, fragments of gnomic subway announcements.
Van Eyck, Guth, Richardson, McFerrin, Bagwell, Dueck and Rhodes
There seemed to be quite a lot of songs about the subway. Glen Roven’s “F from DUMBO” seemed to consist of glances at the crowds by a numbly daydreaming straphanger. Gilda Lyons’ “rapid transit” invoked and celebrated the whole crazy system, its changeable schedules and half-audible warnings. Tom Cipullo’s “G is for Grimy: An Ode to the G Train” celebrated (and trashed) the one line in the system that never enters Manhattan at all. John Glover’s “8:46 AM, Five Years Later” unsensationally presented memories of being caught on the N train beneath the city on the morning of 9/11. There had to be one such song, just one, and this was one’s felt unforced and meaningful.
Yotam Haber’s exquisite setting of “On Leaving Brooklyn” made the very syllables of Julia Kasdorf’s revision of Psalm 137 into musical tones, “borough” and “Babylon” and “Jerusalem” becoming harmonized values and nostalgic wisps of melody. Scott Wheeler’s “At Home in Staten Island,” from an old poem by Charles Mackay, became a parlor ballad concealing its ache in an old-fashioned tune. Mohammed Fairouz’s ambitious “Refugee Blues” (which describes a more general situation rather than one specific to New York), builds on W.H. Auden’s use of a repetitive, folk song-like refrain, to achieve a gathering power. Jorge Martin set Whitman’s “City of Orgies, Walks and Joys!” to an irresistible boogie-woogie rich with the delight of simply romping about the town, while a solo violin gave the fantasy a piquant turn by chiming in just “off” the harmonies we had been led to expect.
Harumi Rhodes was the violinist. The pianists, Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck, were both fine, but Rhodes played with almost vocal inflections of intricate participation rather than accompaniment: the violin as lieder singer. This speaks well of the composers who provided for her as well as her own poetic technique.
The songs were arranged for four contrasting voices, and the program varied and balanced their duties. Soprano Martha Guth and mezzo Jamie Van Eyck partnered well in the deadpan wit of “rapid transit.” Guth, having plumbed near-alto depths earlier, suddenly became a high, keening opera soprano for the melancholy of “At Home In Staten Island,” mated here with Rhodes’s violin, and (on the other side of that large borough) deplored the air of Christina Courtin’s “Fresh Kills.” Van Eyck brought drama to the mourning, accusing “Refugee Blues” and wistfulness to Renée Favand-See’s “Looking West on a Humid Summer Evening,” and lightly aired the brittle wit of Gabriel Kahane’s “Coney Island Avenue.” Tenor Alex Richardson was the yearning, regretting lover of Russell Platt’s “The Avenue” and Christopher Berg’s “OuLiPo in the Bronx.” David McFerrin’s grainy baritone gave us Martin Hennessy’s love song to the mothering city itself, “The City’s Love,” partnered Guth in Ricky Ian Gordon’s setting of Whitman’s invocation, “City of Ships,” and quietly made the point of “8:46 AM.” Texts were provided but the diction of all four was impeccable in the intimate confines of the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
The Songbook was recorded at an earlier performance with different singers, and the two-CD set is available from GPR Records on the Five Boroughs Music Festival web site.
John Yohalem
Click here to purchase the CD.
Five Boroughs Songbook
What does it say about New York that, in the songs of the city commissioned by the Five Boroughs Music Festival and given performances in Brooklyn, Queens and, now, Manhattan, the poets (often the composers themselves) rarely refer to life in that central part of the city, Rodgers and Hart’s “isle of joy”?
Five Boroughs Songbook
“The Five Boroughs Songbook.” Martha Guth (soprano), Jamie Van Eyck (mezzo-soprano), Alex Richardson (tenor), David McFerrin (baritone), Harumi Rhodes (violin), Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck (piano). Manhattan premiere; Baruch Performing Arts Center, January 12.
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These twenty songs by as many composers are largely concerned with the city as an abstraction, a beloved object, a universal core, or else they address the outer boroughs. Composers, poets, songwriters can no longer afford Manhattan perhaps. They live in Brooklyn’s lovely and not-so-lovely neighborhoods, or in the recuperating Bronx, or even Staten Island. They no longer even dream about Manhattan. Larry Hart wouldn’t recognize the place. Greenwich Village was not mentioned all evening—nor Chinatown, nor Harlem, nor even Inwood. Times Square, in Richard Pearson Thomas’s “The Center of the Universe,” was invoked to “remember the bad old days.” It is no use asking (though I do ask) how much longer New York will be “the center of the country, the world, the universe,” when none of the young, the adventurous, the energetic and creative immigrants can afford to live closer in than Bushwick or Newark.
This has an understandable effect on song output. In the gaudy days of Tin Pan Alley, songwriters stumped for inspiration could look out the window and come up with “Lullaby of Broadway” or “Way Out West on West End Avenue” or “When Love Beckoned on Fifty-Second Street.” But there is no Tin Pan Alley any more. Musically, there’s barely a Broadway. Few of the twenty composers on this program write that kind of theater (at least four of them have composed operas), but on this occasion they often seemed to channel the wisecracking New York wit and the nostalgic art largely missing from Broadway for the last generation. Requested by the Five Boroughs Music Festival to write about some aspect of New York, they have not been parochial in their choice of subject or text—some were old, some were modern, some were the composers themselves. Two of the songs were poems by the ever-exultant Walt Whitman, who retired in New Jersey but drew his universal point of view from his Brooklyn youth.
A lot of numbers in the Songbook boasted rumbling piano accompaniments to symbolize the constant basso continuo throb of the city. There were jazz inflections and dance rhythms, passing in and out of a song as if overheard while ambling by in the darkness. There were songs made up of fragments—fragments of overheard conversations, fragments of overheard melody (Harold Arlen, Giuseppe Verdi), fragments of dying or undying love affairs, fragmentary impressions of Brooklyn on a summer night or the odor of the garbage dumps on Staten Island, fragments of gnomic subway announcements.
Van Eyck, Guth, Richardson, McFerrin, Bagwell, Dueck and Rhodes
There seemed to be quite a lot of songs about the subway. Glen Roven’s “F from DUMBO” seemed to consist of glances at the crowds by a numbly daydreaming straphanger. Gilda Lyons’ “rapid transit” invoked and celebrated the whole crazy system, its changeable schedules and half-audible warnings. Tom Cipullo’s “G is for Grimy: An Ode to the G Train” celebrated (and trashed) the one line in the system that never enters Manhattan at all. John Glover’s “8:46 AM, Five Years Later” unsensationally presented memories of being caught on the N train beneath the city on the morning of 9/11. There had to be one such song, just one, and this was one’s felt unforced and meaningful.
Yotam Haber’s exquisite setting of “On Leaving Brooklyn” made the very syllables of Julia Kasdorf’s revision of Psalm 137 into musical tones, “borough” and “Babylon” and “Jerusalem” becoming harmonized values and nostalgic wisps of melody. Scott Wheeler’s “At Home in Staten Island,” from an old poem by Charles Mackay, became a parlor ballad concealing its ache in an old-fashioned tune. Mohammed Fairouz’s ambitious “Refugee Blues” (which describes a more general situation rather than one specific to New York), builds on W.H. Auden’s use of a repetitive, folk song-like refrain, to achieve a gathering power. Jorge Martin set Whitman’s “City of Orgies, Walks and Joys!” to an irresistible boogie-woogie rich with the delight of simply romping about the town, while a solo violin gave the fantasy a piquant turn by chiming in just “off” the harmonies we had been led to expect.
Harumi Rhodes was the violinist. The pianists, Thomas Bagwell and Jocelyn Dueck, were both fine, but Rhodes played with almost vocal inflections of intricate participation rather than accompaniment: the violin as lieder singer. This speaks well of the composers who provided for her as well as her own poetic technique.
The songs were arranged for four contrasting voices, and the program varied and balanced their duties. Soprano Martha Guth and mezzo Jamie Van Eyck partnered well in the deadpan wit of “rapid transit.” Guth, having plumbed near-alto depths earlier, suddenly became a high, keening opera soprano for the melancholy of “At Home In Staten Island,” mated here with Rhodes’s violin, and (on the other side of that large borough) deplored the air of Christina Courtin’s “Fresh Kills.” Van Eyck brought drama to the mourning, accusing “Refugee Blues” and wistfulness to Renée Favand-See’s “Looking West on a Humid Summer Evening,” and lightly aired the brittle wit of Gabriel Kahane’s “Coney Island Avenue.” Tenor Alex Richardson was the yearning, regretting lover of Russell Platt’s “The Avenue” and Christopher Berg’s “OuLiPo in the Bronx.” David McFerrin’s grainy baritone gave us Martin Hennessy’s love song to the mothering city itself, “The City’s Love,” partnered Guth in Ricky Ian Gordon’s setting of Whitman’s invocation, “City of Ships,” and quietly made the point of “8:46 AM.” Texts were provided but the diction of all four was impeccable in the intimate confines of the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
The Songbook was recorded at an earlier performance with different singers, and the two-CD set is available from GPR Records on the Five Boroughs Music Festival web site.
John Yohalem
Click here to purchase the CD.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Nice barihunk piece about 5 Borough Songbook
New Yorkers, Don't Miss This: Five Borough Songbook Concert and CD Release on Thursday
Don't miss the Five Borough Songbook concert and CD release party
We've been covering the Five Boroughs Music Festival as it has moved around New York, but the January 12th concert in Manhattan promises to be extra special. In addition to the concert they wil be releasing their first recording that day, a stunning 2-disc set of the Songbook. We've had the privilege of previewing the recording and it is a must for any lover of art songs or opera.
We can't think of a better evening out than hearing a concert and then heading home with a CD of the all the great music that you just heard. The Songbook is a collection of newly commissioned vocal works by many of the leading composers working today. It celebrates New York City through its history, poetry, and geography. Some of the titles will certainly evoke distinct images or memories to New Yorkers past and present. They include "F From Dumbo," "G Is For Grimy: An Ode To The G Train," and "Coney Island Avenue."
Barihunk David McFerrin will sing Martin Hennessy's "The City's Love"
Did you ever wish that you could have spoken to Bach, Schubert, Verdi or Puccini? Unless you're Shirley MacLaine, you missed your chance. But you'll have a chance to talk to many of the composers on the program on Thursday night, as quite a few of them have agreed to appear for a "Composer Chat" beginning an hour before the 7:30 PM concert.
The concert will be at Engleman Recital Hall at the Baruch Performing Arts Center 55 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Click HERE for tickets or HERE to purchase a CD.
Don't miss the Five Borough Songbook concert and CD release party
We've been covering the Five Boroughs Music Festival as it has moved around New York, but the January 12th concert in Manhattan promises to be extra special. In addition to the concert they wil be releasing their first recording that day, a stunning 2-disc set of the Songbook. We've had the privilege of previewing the recording and it is a must for any lover of art songs or opera.
We can't think of a better evening out than hearing a concert and then heading home with a CD of the all the great music that you just heard. The Songbook is a collection of newly commissioned vocal works by many of the leading composers working today. It celebrates New York City through its history, poetry, and geography. Some of the titles will certainly evoke distinct images or memories to New Yorkers past and present. They include "F From Dumbo," "G Is For Grimy: An Ode To The G Train," and "Coney Island Avenue."
Barihunk David McFerrin will sing Martin Hennessy's "The City's Love"
Did you ever wish that you could have spoken to Bach, Schubert, Verdi or Puccini? Unless you're Shirley MacLaine, you missed your chance. But you'll have a chance to talk to many of the composers on the program on Thursday night, as quite a few of them have agreed to appear for a "Composer Chat" beginning an hour before the 7:30 PM concert.
The concert will be at Engleman Recital Hall at the Baruch Performing Arts Center 55 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Click HERE for tickets or HERE to purchase a CD.
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