To Music
Word painting of a raw, intense poem by Paul Cummings is the essence of this homage to the miracle of music, which begins: Your harmony invades my being; / my body is captured by the embrace / of a melody that leads me out of dark places.
Te cubrirá
A flowing Spanish setting from Psalm 90 (91): The Lord will overshadow you with his pinions, and you will find refuge under his wings. His faithfulness will encompass you with a shield.
I Think of Thee
This marvelous love poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is dynamically dressed with a rich palette of word painting.
The final concert of 2016’s unSUNg series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale included my first and latest song sets.
Four extraordinary musicians – tenor Charles Lane; Paul Sherman, oboe; Melinda Rice, viola; and Roger Lebow, cello – opened the concert with Two Songs on Chinese Love Poems (c. 1977).
To close, prize-winning pianist Robert Thies joined two members of the prize-winning European Concert Trio (Harriet Fraser, soprano; Amanda Walker, clarinet) to reprise my recent William Blake settings, The Shepherd’s Lot, a companion piece to Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock.”
