Posts Tagged 'Chicago Symphony Orchestra'

Hear the Chicago Symphony play “Songs for Adam”

Published February 10, 2010 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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My Songs for Adam, a song cycle on poetry of Susan Stewart, was premiered last fall by baritone Brian Mulligan and the Chicago Symphony with Sir Andrew Davis conducting. Now the cycle is being included on the Chicago Symphony radio broadcast schedule.  Beginning February 12 for 7 days, the concert that included Adam will be broadcast on various radio stations throughout the country. Individual stations set their own times for offering the CSO broadcasts. You can find a list of stations and broadcast times here. Beginning February 15, and continuing for six weeks, the concert will be available for online streaming at the CSO website. You can find an excerpt from the score of Adam at my website. I hope you will have a chance to hear what was a superb performance of the piece.

Encores: no and yes

Published January 16, 2010 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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So my letter about repeat performances did make it into this week’s Arts & Leisure section. (Note the extended discussion of this topic below.)

But just at a moment when I am publicly kvetching about new music not having a life after the premiere, comes the news that my Songs for Adam will continue its life for a bit in the form of a radio broadcast. The piece will be heard on the Chicago Symphony’s radio series for one week beginning Friday, February 12. (You need to check here to find out if and when your local station will broadcast the concert.) In addition, the piece will be available for streaming on the web for six weeks beginning Monday, February 15. After the six weeks, supporting material about the performance (program notes and such) will be archived on the CSO website.

If my letter to the Times makes me sound unappreciative for the efforts that orchestras do make to provide continuing support for new pieces, let me correct that impression by saying I am more than grateful to the CSO for including the piece on their broadcast series.

Back from Chicago

Published November 2, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Brian Mulligan, Sir Andrew Davis, and the Chicago Symphony did a fabulous job with Songs for Adam this past week. Here are links to reviews by John van Rhein, Andrew Patner, and Lawrence A. Johnson.

Read all about it

Published October 22, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Program notes for Songs for Adam are now up on the Chicago Symphony website.

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".

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