Tag: National Sawdust

New York Festival of Song at the DiMenna Center

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

Thank you to pianist Michael Barrett and baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco for their eloquent performance of my From Psalm 116 as part of the New York Festival of Song “NYFOS Next” program at the DiMenna Center last week. There’s a thoughtful review of the program from Brin Solomon here on the National Sawdust Log. A review of an NYC performance is a rare thing, (not that it is common anywhere these days) and I am grateful to have a reflection in print about a concert in which I was involved.

From Psalm 116 is published by Theodore Presser and you can find it at their website here. The piece works well for mezzos as well as baritones - I had the privilege of performing it with Janice Felty a number of years ago.

I made a version of the song for baritone and chamber ensemble as part of the cycle Dark the Star, which includes settings of Rilke and Susan Stewart in addition to the psalm text. The song’s text is a psalm verse, sung in Latin, that may be translated as “Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his beloved.” Here’s a recording of the ensemble version of From Psalm 116, with William Sharp and the 21st Century Consort, conducted by Christopher Kendall. It comes from an album with four of my vocal cycles on the Bridge label.

P.S. - there was also a review by Sherri Rase  in Q on Stage.

Crumb @ 90

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

Tomorrow George Crumb turns 90 years old. (I’ve heard him joke that he was born the day the stock market started to go down in the crash of 1929.) I’ve been involved with a number of performances of his music in celebration of this birthday. Earlier this month I played the Little Suite for Christmas, A. D. 1979 and accompanied Meg Bragle in the Three Early Songs as part of a three-concert survey of George’s music held at Penn in collaboration with Bowerbird, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and the Penn Music Department. And this past Sunday I joined Xak Bjerken to play George’s four-hand piano piece Celestial Mechanics at Cornell University. I’ll be playing again with Xak when we reprise our performance at National Sawdust next week. This will be part of an evening of George’s music curated by Chris Grymes - details above.

Xak played solo pieces on the first half of the concert at Cornell, including a cleverly devised group of short pieces pairing works by three composers with pieces written by three other composers in homage to the first three. The six pieces:

Elegy, in memory of Steven Stucky - Joseph Phibbs
Chorale - Steven Stucky
Étude No. 10: For opposing sonorities - Debussy
Improvisation, Op. 20, No. VII: in memory of Claude Debussy - Bartok
Minuet from Sonata in G, Hob. XVI:5 - Haydn
Minuet on the name HAYDN - Ravel

Broadly speaking, all six pieces were French in flavor, something of a stretch for Haydn of course, though its ornamentation and clarity helped it fit in.

George will be there in NYC next week, so it’s a chance to both see and hear him.

There will be more concerts of George’s music coming up in the Philadelphia area. Swarthmore College will present a program on the evening of November 2, while November 10 there will be a program at Haverford College. In both programs important advocates for Crumb’s music will perform, including Marcantonio Barone, James Freeman, and Gilbert Kalish. I’ll be part of a panel discussing George and his work at the Haverford program.