While the weather ’round us is still tundral, (and since, coincidentally, the sound files from our recording engineer were just delivered) I thought I’d share a few songs from our concert. So here, friends, is a gift for this frigid day: the two final pieces from Songs from the Tundra… Now, sometimes you just have…
Lyric Fest Leonard Bernstein – Biography in Music Presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society at the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater October 21, 2018 at 3pm Tickets Here This is our 7th “Biography in Music”. (This is where Laura and I select a composer whose music and life excites us. Then we launch into…
Well, it happened… the first day of autumn has come and gone. I believe this calls for a song… so I’m sharing one of my favorites, Kurt Weill’s “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday. HERE – Suzanne sings September Song with Ron Kerber, sax and Harold Evans, piano The show, “Knickerbocker Holiday” opened October…
LIEDER ON SIX STRINGS Allen Krantz, guitarist for Humming and Strumming, says Schubert is like a fine consommé, and Brahms is… how did he put it? A potage? A thick stew? A cassoulet? I can’t remember exactly, but you’re getting the point, and I’m getting hungry. Nevertheless, I am here to tell you…
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BORROWED… Mátyás György Seiber and the folksong At heart I must be utterly simple. And what I so love about song, I doubly love in folksong. Fortunately, I am not alone, and many a decent composer, even many renowned ones, have a soft spot for these direct and unpretentious…
Sitting Down on the Job In planning a concert for singers and guitar there are some choices to make: Limit yourself to strictly guitar music? Or include songs written for its third cousin twice removed, the lute? * Stick to Schubert who published songs with guitar accompaniments, or push the envelope a little, venturing into…
5. RAIN I like rain. Actually, it would be more true to say I love rain. But then again, I am not prone to too much melancholy, except the seasonal, almost pleasant kind. So truth to tell, leaden skies, wind-blown sheets of rain, splashing cars, puddled pavements – for me, these only soothe. …
4. The Chattering Mandolin I’m torn. It’s hard to choose an angle from which to view Debussy’s exuberant song, Mandoline. Shall it be the commedia dell’arte characters who inspired the painter Antoine Watteau to capture on canvas this beautiful, nocturnal scene of masqueraders, poets and musicians in sweet poses, amid ancient ruins? Or that these paintings…
3. DEBUSSY, VOYAGER contributed by Rachel Kesselman Friday night, over an apéritif, I hear the question again: Et alors, pourquoi tu es venue en France ? So, why did you come to France? It is a question that naturally rises to the surface after a few introductory exchanges, one whose innocence both comforts and…
2. A VERY STRANGE MAN? “I honestly don’t know if Debussy ever loved anybody really. He loved his music – and perhaps himself. I think he was wrapped up in his genius…. He was a very, very strange man.” —Mary Garden, who premiered Mélisande in the original production of Pelléas et Mélisande So, how strange…
1. THE ALLURE OF THREE There is something so satisfying about the number three. Not too much, not too little. It says it all, or somehow all that needs to be said, anyway. I was thinking about this, and about the distilled perfection of Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis, a three-song cycle with its titillating encounter,…
In 1958 Dominick Argento was 31, he had just landed his first job teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. Did he celebrate by writing a few songs? He did. Since this was long before the allure of setting prose, letters, and diaries set in, Shakespeare would suffice… Here are Jessica Lennick and…
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