The Mountain & Tidewater Songs: A Song Cycle for Baritone and Piano Trio (Steeplechase Chamber Music)
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The Mountain & Tidewater Songs: A Song Cycle for Baritone and Piano Trio (Steeplechase Chamber Music) Details
The Mountain and Tidewater Songs are a set of six pieces for baritone, cello, piano, and violin. The songs are drawn from a series of poems by Daniel Mark Epstein, which appear in No Vacancies in Hell. A deep sense of place, as well as the sweep, lyricism, and warmth of nineteenth-century American life inform both the poetry and music. The cycle charts the journey and reflections of an exile as he leaves behind the towns, countryside, and people he has known. These places and characters, like the apparitions of memory, become an interior landscape, where romance, adventure, duels, buffoonery, loss, villainy, and kindness all play out in ever-swirling reverie and drama.The violin and cello parts are included.
Reviews
My trio picked up The Mountain & Tidewater Songs: A Song Cycle for Baritone and Piano Trio after the success that we had with Damon Ferrante's other trio (Dreaming Cities: A Piano Trio). I like the piece very much. Our trio is having a lot of fun playing this cycle with baritones. There is a lot of very innovative and colorful interplay between the singer and the instrumentalists. Ferrante is really good at creating many levels of musical strata. Highly melodic counterpoint is interwoven throughout the piece. In our concerts, we are performing the piece in its entirely (about 25 minutes). However, I think that many of the songs, especially the first and last ones ("The Exile's Letter" and "The Song of the Hermit"), would work as stand-alone pieces that could be excerpted for a program.