Another week at Marlboro

We are back at Marlboro, and Andy and Robin Davis are here too. We are hearing John Harbison's In the Early Evening, a song-cycle for soprano and piano. Here is what Harbison has to say about this song-cycle:

"For the Tanglewood summer of 2017 Emanuel Ax and Dawn Upshaw invited me to write a single song for their Schubert’s Summer Journey program, a six-concert series encompassing music from Schubert’s final year plus complementary works. In setting Louise Glück’s “Poem”—from her second (and first truly characteristic) collection, The House on Marshland—I began with a Schubertian accompaniment figure, in the spirit of that series. This stand-alone song seemed isolated, so I added two more “coming of age” themed poems from the same collection: “Gemini” and “Departure.” These formed a set, first performed together in summer 2018, until I began to hear the need to balance them with a larger, very recent Glück poem, also called “Poem,” soon to be attached as conclusion."

This is the lyric, by Louise Gluck. The final "Poem" is missing:

Poem

In the early evening, as now, a man is bending over his writing table.

Slowly he lifts his head; a woman

appears, carrying roses.

Her face floats to the surface of the mirror, marked with the green spokes of rose stems.

It is a form

of suffering: then always the transparent page raised to the window until its veins emerge

as words finally filled with ink.

And I am meant to understand

what binds them together

or to the gray house held firmly in place by dusk because I must enter their lives:

it is spring, the pear tree

filming with weak, white blossoms.

Gemini

There is a soul in me

It is asking

to be given its body

It is asking

to be given blue eyes

a skull matted

with black hair

that shape

already formed & detaching So the past put forth

a house filled with

asters & white lilac

a child

in her cotton dress

the lawn, the copper beech— such of my own lives

I have cast off—the sunlight chipping at the curtains

& the wicker chairs uncovered, winter after winter, as the stars finally thicken & descend as snow.

Departure

My father is standing on a railroad platform. Tears pool in his eyes, as though the face glimmering in the window were the face of someone

he was once. But the other has forgotten;

as my father watches, he turns away, drawing the shade over his face,

goes back to his reading.

And already in its deep groove

the train is waiting with its breath of ashes.

"Composer John Harbison’s concert music catalog of almost 300 works is anchored by three operas, seven symphonies, twelve concerti, a ballet, six string quartets, numerous song cycles and chamber works, and a large body of sacred music that includes cantatas, motets, and the orchestral-choral works Four Psalms, Requiem, and Abraham. He also has a substantial body of jazz compositions and arrangements. Harbison has received commissions from most of America’s premiere musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As one of America’s most distinguished artistic figures, he is recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize." 

Harbison is on the faculty of MIT.

Composer John Harbison, b. 1938

After this we will hear Benjamin Britten's Canticle III, Still Falls the Rain.

Later:

The Britten is scored for piano, horn and tenor. 

It was written after the bombings of London in WW2. 

The poem is by Edith Sitwell:

Still Falls The Rain

Still falls the Rain—-
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—-
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet On the Tomb: 

Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us—-
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain—-
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,—-those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear—-
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh… the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain—-
Then—- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune—-
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,—-dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain—-
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

The musicians performing Britten's Canticle III:

Daniel McGrew, tenor, Wei-Ping Chou, horn, Lydia Brown, piano

Daniel McGrew holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and Yale University; in the spring of 2020 he completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan. He is a committed teacher and pedagogue, having taught studio voice, lyric dictions, and music history at University of Michigan, Oberlin Conservatory, Bowling Green State University, and Adrian College. He currently teaches classes in ear training and singing at Regional Center for the Arts in Trumbull, Connecticut.

Daniel McGrew