Author: Nicholas Smolenski

Picture of the Day – July 9, 2012

Jim Liddle narrates Inés Thiebaut’s work Forget Nothing and Forgive Me Anyway while accompanied by Janet Jacobson on violin. Inés writes the following:

This is the second major collaboration with poet and dear friend Molly Bain. She wrote this poem on commission, and my only instructions to her were: “just make it abstract, don’t tell a story…” But Molly always writes stories, for she is a storyteller, even when they are not linear. Her words are the sole inspiration for the music, which is just a sound representation of them. In conversation, the voice and the violin follow each other while narrating the sense of aloneness, the notions of past and future, and how sometimes the simple things in life are not that simple…

Janet Jacobson, Jim Liddle

Picture of the Day – July 8, 2012

Another singer from the 2011 festival! In addition to being our guest composer for the 2011 festival (our first featured composer to speak around the Greater Hartford area), Gilda Lyons performed her cycle A Small Handful (2002), an emotionally powerful setting of Anne Sexton’s poetry, on the Concert Pro Femina. Of the piece Gilda writes:

While Anne Sexton’s troubled existence was littered with depression and suicide attempts, she remained committed to turning the detritus of her life into poetry. Maxine Kumin, a close friend and trusted colleague of Sexton’s, wrote “I am convinced that poetry kept Anne alive for the eighteen years of her creative endeavors.  When everything else soured… the making of poems remained her one constant.”
The three poems that I have chosen to set for unaccompanied voice span the length of these creative endeavors: from “Music Swims Back To Me” found in her first publication To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960); to Seven Times from the cycle “The Death Baby” found in her 1974 publication The Death Notebooks; and, finally, to “Where It Was At Back Then” from 45 Mercy Street (1976), Sexton’s first posthumous publication.

Picture of the Day – July 6, 2012

Sheri Brown on alto saxophone giving an amazing performance of Joan Tower’s Wings (1981) at December’s benefit concert. A virtuosic (and at times frenetic) piece, the composer writes:

Wings was written for my friend and colleague Laura Flax, who premiered the piece at her recital in Merkin Hall (New York City) on December 14, 1981. The image behind the piece is one of a large bird—perhaps a falcon—at times flying very high gliding along the thermal currents, barely moving. At other moments, the bird goes into elaborate flight patterns that loop around, diving downwards, gaining tremendous speeds.

Photo courtesy Mary Scripko.

Picture of the Day – July 5, 2012

Anne Berry, Ryan Caparella, and Windsor Johnson – members of The Living Room Players, a regional chamber music ensemble – speaking to the audience at December’s benefit concert. The trio performed two movements of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, op. 17. Schumann’s piano trio is considered, “probably her greatest achievement. Written in 1846, at a time of great stress, it has an autumnal, melancholy quality, and demonstrates a mastery of sonata form and polyphonic techniques” (Nancy Reich, Grove Music Online).

Photo courtesy Mary Scripko.