Ned Rorem - Our Town
£28.45
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Label: New World Records
Cat No: NW80790
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 2
Genre: Opera
Release Date: 14th July 2017
Contents
Artists
Matthew DiBattistaMargot Rood
Brendan Buckley
Donald Wilkinson
Krista River
David Kravitz
Angela Gooch
Glorivy Arroyo
Stanley Wilson
Monadnock Music
Conductor
Gil RoseWorks
Our TownArtists
Matthew DiBattistaMargot Rood
Brendan Buckley
Donald Wilkinson
Krista River
David Kravitz
Angela Gooch
Glorivy Arroyo
Stanley Wilson
Monadnock Music
Conductor
Gil RoseAbout
Intended from the start to be a chamber opera, the orchestration is small, and the scoring is light and transparent throughout — consistent with a work best suited to young voices. Rorem moves in and out of speech and utilises more elevated recitative (parlando) than in his previous theatrical works. He manifests Wilder’s “emotional shyness” with abrupt stylistic cross-cutting between Americana (Thomsonian faux-Protestant hymns, plush sustained cinematic strings, Copland-esque woodwind solos, Ivesian collages), transatlantic modernism (the tartly-scored “sting” chords, jagged, off-kilter ostinatos in close-canon, denatured melodic fragments in place of memorable tunes), and Gallic lyricism (rapturous string obbligatos, sudden snatches of emotionally-vibrant melody, Debussy-esque orchestration). Everywhere in the music there is a sort of cool, self-contained regretfulness — the regret so central to the play’s initial impetus, a regret so intense as to border on dread — that perfectly underpins and undercuts the sentimentality of the portraits.
Rorem believes that Satie’s Socrate may be “the greatest of all operas.” Certainly, he exploits in his score for Our Town the same kind of baroque cantata textures and effects as Satie did in his 1920 masterpiece. But the Rorem and McClatchy Our Town also contains — in the propulsive, off-kilter ostinati percolating uneasily beneath the Nantucket matter-of-factness of its musical surfaces and its stubborn unwillingness to wear its heart on its sleeve — an astonishing undercurrent of unanticipated, and highly effective dramaturgical fury.
“Langorous melodic lines or fragments, often with an unmistakable Americana flavour, interact in the orchestra, and the vocal parts engagingly follow suit. If Wilder's play is to have music, Rorem's is credible and often exquisite.” – Financial Times
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