O Sapientia/Steal Away

Published March 10, 2010 Uncategorized 4 Comments
Tags: Albany Records, Avalon String Quartet, Hayes Biggs

The highlight of the newly released Avalon String Quartet CD on Albany is O Sapientia/Steal Away by Hayes Biggs. Hayes was a colleague of mine in the Columbia doctoral composition program. I have long felt his music deserves wider recognition; perhaps this disc can help make that happen.

The compound title of the piece refers to its sources: Hayes’s own motet on the Advent antiphon “O Sapientia” (“O Wisdom that proceeded from the mouth of the Most High, Come and show us the way of prudence.”) and the spiritual “Steal Away” (“Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus”). These are woven into a compelling narrative that plays continuously. The piece begins with darkly charged chords, starting from e-flat minor, which frame more lyrical music, including the “Sapientia” material. A scherzo interrupts, “obsessed” as the composer puts it, with repeated notes, but also including witty references to similar gestures in Beethoven and Mozart quartets. The material of the first part returns, yielding to a disconsolate meditation on “Steal Away”, hauntingly tentative at first; later, more lyrically extended. The piece ends with tender, high register harmonies, imbued with the intervalic colors of the “Steal Away” melody – essentially tonal harmonies, like the piece’s opening, but seen now in a very different light, a world away from the intense, brooding sounds with which the piece began.

The style of the piece is not easily categorized, perhaps occupying a spot a bit to the left of late Britten. Such comparisons are inadequate; Hayes’s language is his own. I found the form of the piece engrossing, the harmonies varied and telling, the string writing idiomatic – and the emotional content powerful.

There are so many fine young string quartets these days that the Avalon may have not yet come to your attention. It should. They play the Biggs piece with passion and precision, sensitively varied colors, and impeccable pacing.

This disc includes music of interest by David Macbride, Stephen Gryc and Ethan Wickman, but it is Sapientia that most strongly continues to claim my attention.

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James Primosch, composer

When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".

Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Lydian, Cavani, Cassatt, Ying, and Miami string quartets, the 21st Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, Dawn Upshaw, Lisa Saffer, Janice Felty, and Lambert Orkis. Twelve of his compositions have been recorded for Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

David Patrick Stearns on “Songs for Adam”

If there's anything out there like Primosch's Songs of Adam, I haven't heard it - though the music wears its singularity lightly, with no need to express itself radically. It has a confidence of expression that comes of Primosch's having written a steady stream of song cycles since the late 1990s. Composers are still drawing legitimate inspiration from poets of the increasingly distant past, such as Walt Whitman, but Primosch pushes both himself and thus his listeners onto new ground with Susan Stewart's verse, which are called songs in their printed version because they suggest music, especially in the first poem, in which Adam is stuttering his way into existence.

Both poet and composer share an ability to contemplate how basic elements of existence might feel for the first time, and the duo know how to capture that in their respectively cultivated vocabularies, with an emotional rightness that never becomes too analytical.

In fact, Primosch enters the Korngold zone when describing Adam's intoxication with the word. Though words are set dramatically and in ways that are well written for the voice, the best moments are in the masterly orchestration, which gives an extra percussive spark to moments of discovery and unflinchingly confronts the agony of Adam's expulsion from Eden.

The pale strings capture his disappointment in the real world in an overall dramatic arc that's almost epic, going from the unimaginable (the beauty of Eden) to the unthinkable (the world's first children, Abel and Cain, and the world's first fratricide).
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010

Current Projects:

Working with audio wizard George Blood on editing recordings of "Holy the Firm", "From a Book of Hours", "Four Sacred Songs", and "Dark the Star" for eventual CD release. The performers are Susan Narucki, William Sharp, and the 21st Century Consort, directed by Christopher Kendall.

Two composition projects:
- a set of short piano pieces, commissioned by a consortium of pianists (currently 12) from across the United States.
- a cycle of songs for soprano and orchestra. Susan Stewart, whose poetry I have set in three previous pieces, has written new poems specifically for this project, to be called "A Sibyl".

Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog