William Bolcom: Let Evening Come, text by Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon
Stephen Brown: MAXWELL, Larry Douglas, text from a newspaper obituary
Chester Duncan: Sayings, text by S.C. Eckhardt-Grammatté
Craig Galbraith: The Fenian Cycle
Ottorino Respighi: Il Tramonto, text by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This programme presents, in sung and spoken form, a series of meditations on lives lived, and on the manner of their passing. The song-texts range from the spareness of a newspaper obituary to the intensity of one of Shelley's most extravagantly romantic poems, but all trace, in some way, the connection between the living and the dead, and the passage from human relationship - with friends, lovers, family, society, God - to memory. The title piece, by William Bolcom, is a particularly moving example of the alchemy which death works in the world: the viola part was intended to represent the dedicatee, who died before the project of the work could be realised, but it became, instead, a commentator; the departed artist and friend could not be replaced, but in the process of commemorating her passing, something new and lovely came into being.

William Bolcom (b. 1938 ) Let Evening Come (1994) for voice, viola, and piano
American composer and pianist William Bolcom studied with Darius Milhaud and at Stanford University, and remains a prolific creator of music in almost all genres, although he is known primarily for his vocal and chamber pieces. He also began teaching composition at the University of Michigan in 1973, and has been chair since 1998. His works have been performed widely in North America and Europe, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees.

In 1993, Bolcom was asked to create a duet for Benita Valente and Tatiana Troyanos, but while the choice of texts was still under discussion, Troyanos unexpectedly died. The shape of the commission was changed, with a viola part included to represent the departed singer, and three texts (by Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Kenyon) chosen to describe “with ever greater acceptance the phenomenon of death”. The first movement “observes with an almost journalistic candour the states we… pass through after the death of a powerful person”; the viola interacts intimately with the voice, almost impelling the forward movement of the piece.

The second movement resolves grief - rather than softening it - through deeper understanding, while the final setting “invites us to contemplate the elegant beauty in death’s resolution”. In these two movements the viola functions less as an actor than as a commentator on the text, and Bolcom describes the viola-and-piano interlude between them as “a gateway to the coming of evening”. Throughout the work, the piano serves to portray the world against which these individual spiritual transformations take place, and the passing of time in all its complexity.


Stephen Brown MAXWELL, Larry Douglas (2003) for soprano and string quartet
Stephen Brown was born in Nottingham, England, studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and now teaches at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. He has written numerous solo and chamber works, pedagogical pieces, songs, and orchestral and choral music, and is the artistic director and conductor of the St Cecilia Orchestra in Sidney, BC; his music has been performed by the Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria Symphony Orchestras. He is also interested in early jazz, , and plays banjo with the Bastion Jazz Band.

MAXWELL, Larry Douglas, described as an elegy “dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Larry Douglas Maxwell” was originally composed in 1997 for soprano and string orchestra, and performed in Sidney in 1998. The sparse text is “merely” that of a newspaper obituary, but the dense contrapuntal interweaving of the vocal and instrumental parts echoes the close relationships which can exist among family and friends, and underlines the rift created in such a web by the death of an individual. According to reviewer Deryk Barker, the original performance “left the audience temporarily silenced, mute testimony to the power of music and friendship”. The revision for string quartet was preparted by the composer especially for the Talisker Players.


Chester Duncan (1913-2002) – Sayings (1991) for tenor (soprano), oboe, and piano
Duncan was born in Saskatchewan but has lived most of his life in Winnipeg. He is primarily a composer of songs, and his work includes cycles of texts by W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Herrick, A.E. Housman, and James Reaney. He had a long and busy career as a piano soloist, chamber musician, and music critic, and was also a professor in the English department at the University of Manitoba. The composer’s note for Sayings reads as follows:

This work is dedicated to Ferdinand Eckhardt. The sayings in it of S.C. Eckhardt-Gramatté (called Sonya by her friends) are authentic, or virtually so, or so much in the spirit of her mind and temperament as to be acceptable. Two musical quotations are used in the piece: (1) from the late composer’s Passacaglia and Fugue (a few bars at the beginning and at the end), and (2) from the first song of Schubert’s Die Winterreise (“Gute Nacht”) - a passage, a phrase at the end, which had a special meaning to the Eckhardts. The text of Sayings begins with extracts from the Book of Ecclesiates, or The Preacher, phrases which were used at the composer’s funeral. After this short prologue the composition is divided into three sections: ART - the composer’s views on that subject - the art of music, of course; LIFE - a more troubled section on her life in Winnipeg, rough or smooth; and LOVE and DEATH - a more personal and domestic counterpoint between these two great mysteries and these two great people.

The aesthetic connection between Duncan and his subject in this piece is perhaps articulated most clearly in the quotation from Oscar Wilde which appears on the title page: “Art should never try to make itself popular. The public should try to make itself artistic”.


Craig Galbraith (b. 1975) The Fenian Cycle (2004) for mezzo-soprano, English horn, and string quartet
Galbraith studied composition at UBC and the University of Toronto and, in May 1998, received Second Prize in the choral category of the national SOCAN Awards for Young Composers. In 2000, he was awarded first place in SOCAN’s Hugh Le Caine Award for an electroacoustic work, Silhouette, which also won the second prize in the CBC’s National Competition for Young Composers, as well as the People’s Choice award. His works have been performed by Scott St. John, the Phoenix Chamber Choir, the Vancouver Cantata Singers, the Vancouver Chamber Choir, and musica intima, and several have been recorded for CBC broadcasts.

The Fenian Cycle consists of settings of texts about life’s end, and expectations of the afterlife, drawn primarily from the collection of verse and prose which deals with the Fianna, the band of Irish heroes associated with the legendary Finn Mac Cumhaill. Movements III and IV set medieval Fenian texts, while the text of the second movement comes from The Poems of Ossian, by the 18th-century Scottish forger-“translator” James MacPherson; the final movement is a prayer from a 19th-century folk collection. The first movement is “an extension and variation on Palestrina’s motet, Sicut cervus, of which the composer says;

It describes the soul longing to be with God, and serves as a nice spiritual counterpoint to the more "earthly" Fenian texts. Musical quotations from Palestrina insert a more contemplative acceptance of a long-standing and traditional spiritualism surrounding death.
The melodies for the voice and the English horn are primarily modal, while the string quartet functions to disturb and interject with contrasting rhythms and dissonant sonorities. This dichotomy becomes most explicit in the final movement, but when the Celtic text is complete, all the performers unite for a final quotation from Palestrina, on the text, “When shall I come and appear before His presence”.


Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) Il Tramonto for mezzo-soprano and string quartet (1914)
Respighi studied violin and composition in Bologna until he was twenty, and then went to St Petersburg to play viola in the Russian Imperial Opera; while there, he studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, who influenced his use of instrumental colour in orchestral and chamber writing. After a period of ten years in Berlin, where he studied with Max Bruch, he settled in Rome in 1913 to teach, compose, and perform.

The following year saw the production of Il Tramonto, a setting of P.B. Shelley’s 1816 intensely romantic poem “The Sunset” (translated into Italian by Rinaldo Ascoli), and one of Respighi’s most abidingly popular chamber works. He set Shelley’s overwrought blank-verse tragedy in a fluid combination of recitative and arioso styles, accompanied by lush and colourful chromatic harmonies in the string parts. The result is a curiously ageless but inescapably Italian work, with echoes of both Monteverdi and Puccini. Il Tramonto would resemble nothing so much as a miniature opera, with its tale of young love abruptly cut off, save that the tragic climax occurs just past the halfway point of the piece; the overall dramatic focus is therefore on the surviving lover, her “gentleness and patience and sad smiles”, and on the long “twilight” of passion.


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