CD156 Bernard Rands: Canti Trilogy
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Bernard Rands: Canti Trilogy Douglas Ahlstedt, tenor
CD156, Dual Disc Set, $15.95
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| CD1: CANTI DEL SOLE 27:27 | CD1: CANTI LUNATICI 35:09 |
| 1. Mattina, Giuseppe Ungaretti | 15. Ed è Subito Sera, Salvatore Quasimodo |
| 2. The Dawn Verse, D.H. Lawrence | 16. Simples, James Joyce |
| 3. from The
Masque of the Twelve Months, Anonymous, 12th C. |
17. Welcome to the Moon, Anonymous, from the Gaelic |
| 4. from Soleil et Chair, Arthur Rimbaud | 18. La Luna Asoma, Frederico Garcia Lorca |
| 5. Portami il girasole, Eugenio Montale | 19. from Mondsand, Hans Arp |
| 6. from Vision and Prayer, Dylan Thomas | 20. The Moon, William Blake |
| 7. Frutteto, Leonardo Sinisgalli | 21. Romance de la Luna, Luna, Frederico Garcia Lorca |
| 8. Futility, Wilfred Owen | 22. from Mondsand, Hans Arp |
| 9. September, Peter Hüchel | 23. The Moon, Walt Whitman |
| 10. November by the Sea, D.H. Lawrence | 24. from The Moon
and the Yew Tree, Sylvia Plath |
| 11. Fadensonnen, Paul Celan | 25. from Mondsand, Hans Arp |
| 12. Harmonie du Soir, Charles Beaudelaire | 26. Amer au goût ce soir, Antoin Artaud |
| 13. The Sunset Verse, D.H. Lawrence | 27. Moonrise, Gerard Manley Hopkins |
| 14. Ed è Subito Sera, Salvatore Quasimodo | 28. The Waning Moon, Percy Blythe Shelley |
| 29. Finita è la Notte, Salvatore Quasimodo |
| CD2: CANTI DELL'ECLISSE 33:56 |
| 1. from Cantico delle Creature, St. Francis of Assisi |
| 2. An Eclipse, Pindar (translated from the Greek by C.M. Bowra) |
| 3. La Révolution en Été, René Daumal |
| 4. from Samson Agonistes, John Milton |
| 5. from A Guglielmo Gonzaga, Torquato Tasso |
| 6. Eclipse, Al-Ghassani (translated from the Arabic by A.J. Arberry) |
| 7. Ed è Subito Sera, Salvatore Quasimodo |
| 8. Eclipse, Emily Dickinson |
| 9. A****, René Char |
| 10. This Precipice Garden, James DePriest |
| 11. from Arbol Adentro, Octavio Paz |
| 12. Zeitgehoft, Paul Celan |
| 13. The Eclipse, Henry Vaughan |
Listen:
"Futility" (Wilfrid Owen) & "September" (Peter Hüchel) from Canti del Sole by Bernard Rands
...This is music of sweeping ambition, brilliantly achieved, somewhat comparable to the vocal music of Sir Michael Tippitt. ...The transcendental is the most difficult state to achieve in art and here it is realised to something near perfection.
--John Story, The Gramophone, April 2005
This is an interesting set that promises to reveal new subtleties with each hearing. It's given exemplary presentation here, with flawless singing and gorgeous sound.
--Gimbel, American Record Guide, May/June 2005
Bernard Rands
Through more than a hundred published works and many recordings, Bernard Rands is established as a major figure in contemporary music. His work Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His large orchestral suites, Le Tambourin, won the 1986 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award.
Conductors including Barenboim, Boulez, Berio, Maderna, Marriner, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Rilling, Salonen, Sawallisch, Schiff, Schuller, Schwarz, Silverstein, Sinopoli, Slatkin, von Dohnanyi, and Zinman, among others, have programmed his music. Rands made a wonderful and dedicated contribution to the music of our time while he was Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra for seven years, from 1989 to 1996. His first three years of residency were part of the Meet The Composer Residency Program, and four years were made possible by continued funding from the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rands's works are widely performed and frequently commercially recorded. His work, Canti d'Amor, recorded by Chanticleer, won a Grammy Award in 2000.
Born in England, Rands emigrated to the United States in 1975, becoming an American citizen in 1983. He has been honored by the American Academy and Institutes of the Arts and Letters, Broadcast Music, Inc., the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and the Barlow, Fromm, Koussevitsky Foundation, among others.
Commissions have come from the Suntory concert hall in Tokyo, the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the BBC Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra,, the Internationale Bach Akademie, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Many chamber works have resulted from commissions by major ensembles and festivals around the world. His chamber opera, Belladonna, was commissioned by the Aspen Festival for its fiftieth anniversary in 1999.
A dedicated and passionate teacher, Rands has been a guest composer at many international festivals and Composer-in-Residence at the Aspen and Tanglewood Festivals. Rands is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard Univeristy where he teaches with distinction. The originality and distinctive character of his music have been variously described as "plangent lyricism" with a "dramatic intensity" and a "musicality and clarity of idea allied to a sophisticated and elegant technical mastery" - qualities developed from his studies with Dallapiccola and Berio.
Rands was inducted into the American Academy of Art and Letters in 2004.
Bernard Rands: Canti Trilogy
by Roger Marsh
The human voice, possibly the most subtle, complex, flexible, fragile, and persuasive carrier of musical ideas and meanings, has always been an inspiration for and influence upon my entire musical thinking. In the Canti Trilogy, liturgy texts (poetic virtuosity) interact with vocal and instrumental capacities (musical virtuosity) to create not a setting of words to music but a labyrinth of relationships and connections - sometimes simple, even elementary and clear; sometimes complex and mysterious. --Bernard Rands
One of the most respected and successful composers working in the United States today, Bernard Rands has built up a catalogue of work reflecting a lifetime of engagement with modern musical and literary ideas. Symphony audiences around the world know him as a composer with an infallible ear for sonority and his prowess as an orchestral composer has been reflected in his seven-year association as Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra and in the large number of commissions and performances by leading orchestras in many countries. Even more fundamental, however, to the composer's creative identity, is the part played by vocal music in his large and diverse output.
Works from the late 1960's and early 70's reflect Rands's evolving concern to convert linguistic properties into musical analogs, principally in a series of ballads: Ballad 1 exploring the vocal behavior found in a nightclub setting; Ballad 2 in a lieder recital; Ballad 3 in worship. Metalpsis 2 for solo mezzo-soprano, six amplified voices, and ensemble arranges texts from the requiem Mass, fragments from the sayings of Chairman Mao (in several languages) around a central text - "Hymn to Steel" - by the English writer John Wain.
By analyzing the linguistic elements of a text, Rands creates models for musical articulations, timbre, contour and dramatic polyphony. Crucial influences on his creative development have been the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. An important early work, Wildtrack 2 for soprano and orchestra, includes passages from Finnegans Wake, and poems from Joyce's Chamber Music are the texts for the Montiverdian Canti d'Amour for chamber choir. Beckett's work is referred to or used as text in many of Rands's pieces, often flagged up by evocative titles: ...among the voices...; ...in the receding mist...; ...where the murmurs die...; ...body and shadow...; ...and the rain... Memo 2 for solo trombone, one of a series of solo pieces (now 10 in number) is almost a literal musical transcription of Beckett's late play Not I.
The real matter here, as in all of Rands's work, is the juxtaposition of small musical modules which are then constantly regrouped and recombined, so that each takes on a new meaning and function in the musical discourse as their language equivalents do in the work of Beckett. Over four decades Rands has refined and elaborated this process. The 2002 apokryphos - a 45-minute work for solo soprano, massive chorus, and orchestra on texts from several books of the Apocrypha and poems in German by exiled Jewish poets - demonstrates Rands's complete mastery of his means and methods.
Composed between 1980 and 1993, Canti Trilogy reflects Rands's wide literary concerns and a deep understanding of the 42 chosen texts in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) which constitute the three cycles: Canti Lunatici (Moon Songs) for soprano; Canti del Sole (Sun Songs) for tenor; Canti dell'Eclisse (Songs of the Eclipse) for bass. Each of these exists in two versions - one for solo voice and orchestra, the other for solo voice and chamber ensemble - the six related works adding up to a performance time of some three hours. Acknowledgements of this massive and unique accomplishment is reflected in Canti Trilogy's many and regular performances making it part of the significant music literature of our time.
Each of the cycles follows a "narrative" progression. The "moon" cycle moves from sundown to dawn beginning with Quasimodo's poem "Ed è subito sera" (And in no time it is evening). The "sun" cycle begins with sunrise and ends with the same Quasimodo poem. The "eclipse" cycle, in contrast, comprises a more abstract progression - a journey from St. Francis's beatific acceptance of the divine order, through Milton's and Tass's eclipse-inspired despair and doubt, concluding with Henry Vaughan's weary grief and resignation. The same Quasimodo poem stands at the halfway point, the very center of the cycle and, as in the two previous cycles, it is "suddenly evening" - but in this case, evening occurs at midday! Emily Dickinson's verse follows immediately: "Sunset at Night - is natural - But Sunset on the dawn Reverses Nature ... Jehovah's watch is wrong..."
In Canti Lunatici (1980) two principal cycles - one of text and one of musical definition - revolve at fixed but different rates, thus influencing each other and affecting the larger, complex form of the whole work. First, the texts are chosen and ordered to suggest the waxing (the first seven poems), the full moon (the eighth poem), and the waning (the final seven poems) - a "narrative" that encompasses the extraordinary and unpredictable responses of the human psyche. The second cycle, that of musical parameters, elaborates the text "narrative" resulting at different times in clarity, obscurity, ambiguity, mystery, and eccentricity. Rands has written: "It was never my aim to compose a song cycle for voice and instrumental accompaniments in which each song has its own musical and formal integrity. Rather the intention was to create a labyrinth of relationships by the compositional arrangement of the resources of voice, text, instrument, and musical idea."
Canti del Sole, composed in 1983, arranges 14 poems in two groups of 7. The first group is delivered at a much faster rate than the second group, suggesting an urgency and relative brevity of the human experience of morning (until midday) compared with the experience of the period from midday until midnight. This latter, a more languorous, slower-moving, leisurely experience is captured as a succession of reflective texts and moods. Clearly, this also evokes the human experience of lifespan from the brevity of childhood through the decades of adulthood.
The texts chose for Canti dell'Eclisse (1992) are consistently of a dark mood. After the opening jubilant praise for the magnificence of the heavens, each subsequent poem reinforces the enveloping gloom toward the final eclipse - again a parallel to life's inevitable ending.
Taken as a whole, Canti Trilogy adds up to a powerful and moving musical experience. This is music that speaks directly, in a language of brilliant modernity, but a language which remains rooted in what the composer refers to as "the vernacular." The guiding force is always the poetry. From it emerges a warmth of color, rhythmic energy, and musical cross reference in a dazzling display of technical virtuosity, but all in service of the "labyrinth of relationships" contained in the sequence of poems which Rands has lovingly assembled.
© 2004 Roger Walsh
Deeper Promptings
by Kathleen Cecilia Ginther
The Canti Trilogy projects a rich, multi-layered fabric of musical and textural interrelationships that is at once very complex yet immediately communicative. To experience this work is to undergo an epic journey, an arch from first light to final darkness, with the full banquet of human emotion in between.
The astonishing range of this collection of poems in terms of language, culture, time, and place results in a sweeping document of the human experience, even before a single note has been heard.
Canti del Sole suggests various degrees of physical, but also emotional and psychological warmth ranging from burning intensity to cold obscurity; from blinding clarity to chilling ambiguity. The music of Sole has an expansive, flowing character; it radiates a golden light. The opening poem, by Giuseppe Ungaretti, reads simply "M'illuminato d'immenso" - I am illuminated by immensity. In Canti Lunatici, the emotional and psychological dimension is particularly potent. Rands exploits both meanings of the Latin root luna (lunar and lunatic) to their fullest, creating a vocal drama that swings wildly in mood - variously poetic and mysterious, hilarious, bawdy, desolate, agitated, playful, menacing, peaceful, hysterical,, utterly insane. By contrast, Canti dell'Eclisse possesses a dark essence; there are flashes of humor and moments of relative lightness, but the deep vocal timbre, the somber harmonies, the slow rhythms, the generally declamatory tone, and the orchestration which remains predominately in the lower registers, paint a nocturne of varying values of dimness, shadow, and loss.
The poems of each Canti are arranged so that the alternation of languages forms symmetrical patterns; in fact these patterns are often close to perfect palindromes, revealing a level of precompositional structure at work which is quite pervasive.
All three Canti cycles utilize a range of vocal techniques in order to project more directly specific elements of the texts. Many kinds of vocalization are used, encompassing the gamut from stage speech to singing, including rhythmically notated speech (wherein the rhythm is notated, but pitch is not); modulated speech (wherein a general pitch contour is indicated, in addition to rhythm); Sprechstimme (halfway between speaking and singing), and parlando, or quasi parlando (sung, but with pitches slightly bent). Each of the Canti cycle fully exploits timbral differences within the singer's range. Lunatici utilizes the soprano's entire voice, while both the tenor and bass voices employ falsetto singing as a means of heightening the drama and varying the timbre. However, the voices' prevalent behavior in the Trilogy is pure bel canto singing, and its governing impulse is melodic. Lunatici is more melismatic than its two counterparts; the voice seems to generate long trails of moonbeams, undulating melismas, hovering at times at the far edge of what the voice can do. Sole is direct and essentially syllabic as it projects a luxuriance in its unfolding. Eclisse possesses a formal declamatory character. The opeing of Eclisse, in fact, recalls the highly declamatory third movement of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms.
The music throughout each section of the Trilogy is continuous and the poems are generally linked together, either by following one another in very close succession or by instrumental transitions. Rands's instrumental writing, however, is by no means of the traditional instrumental interlude variety; the voice and the instruments are so deeply intertwined and so closely enmeshed with the musical material that they do not separate into tidy categories such as song/interlude or voice/instrument. Rather, the relationships are organic; the instrumental writing grows out of the vocal line, which then colors, thickens, accents, emphasizes, enhances, anticipates or obscures that line.
The Canti Trilogy, a huge "labyrinthian" artwork of textural, musical, and thematic interconnections accomplishes unity of both macrocosmic and microcosmic level. Many of these interconnections, such as the thematic relationship of the texts (suggestive of a "narrative") are of the type traditionally associated with the song cycle, and are apparent upon first hearing. Further listening and examination of the scores reveals a multitude of more subtle relationships. There is a fusion between idea, instrumentation, and sound material -a unity that has been at the core of Rands's music from his earliest compositions.
©2004 Kathleen Cecilia Ginther (excerpted from Deeper Promptings)
Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is one of the few professional orchestras in the United States dedicated exclusively to performing and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 1996 by Artistic Director Gil Rose, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's mission is to illuminate the connections that exist naturally between contemporary music and contemporary society by reuniting composers and audiences in a shared concert experience. In eight years, BMOP has produced more than forty concerts of contemporary orchestral music, presented thirty world premieres including sixteen commissioned by the orchestra, recorded over thirty works and released seven world premiere recordings, and launched Opera Unlimited, a new festival of contemporary chamber opera.
A seven-time winner of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Orchestral Music, BMOP hsa been presented by the FleetBoston Celebrity Series, The Tanglewood Music Festival, and the Boston Cyberarts Festival, and has performed at such venues as Jordan Hall, Symphony Hall, New York's Miller Theater, Winter Garden, and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. BMOP recordings are currently available from Chandos, New World, Naxos, and Oxingale.
Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Laura Frautschi, violin
Joan Ellersick, viola
Emmanuel Feldman, cello
Deborah Dunham, bass
Ann K. Bobo, flute
Gary Gorczyca, clarinet
Jeffrey Work, trumpet
Hans Bohn, trombone
Craig McNutt, percussion
Robert Schulz, percussion
Nina Ferrigno, piano
Gil Rose is recognized as one of a new generation of American conductors shaping the future of American music. His orchestral and operatic perforamnces and recordings have been recognized by critics and fans alike. In 1996, Gil Rose founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Since 2003, Mr. Rose has also served as Music Director of Opera Boston, an innovative opera company in residence a the historic Cutler Majestic Theatre. In June 2003, BMOP and Opera Boston together launched the much-celebrated Opera Unlimited, a ten-day contemporary opera festival featuring five opera and three world premieres.
As a guest conductor, Mr. Rose made his Tanglewood Festival debut in 2002 conducting Lukas Foss' opera Griffelkin, a work he recorded for Chandos and released in 2003 to rave reviews. Also in 2003, he made his guest debut with the Netherlands Radio Symphony conducting three world premieres as part of the Holland Festival. He has led the American Composers Orchestra, the West Bohemian Symphony Orchestra in the Czech Republic, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the National Symphony of the Ukraine, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Also recognized for his recordings of American orchestral repertoire, Gil Rose's discography includes eight world premiere recordings. His recording of the complete music of Arthur Berger was chosen by the New York Times as one of the "Best CDs of 2003."
Douglas Ahlstedt has sung professionally in the world's greatest opera houses and concert halls from the renowned stages of Europe, South America, the Orient, and Africa, to the Metropolitan Opera, where he has sung 189 performances. He is the only American tenor featured in leading roles, including Fenton in Verdi's Falstaff and Pelleas in Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, on the James Levine 25th Anniversary Collection of notable scenes from Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.
His singing career began with the American Boychoir with whom he toured the United States and Canada. During that period, he sang the role of Miles in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw.
In addition to performing worldwide, Mr. Ahlstedt is associate professor of voice at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He specializes in teaching vocal health and collaborates with the University of Pittsburgh Voice Center to promote proper care of the voice. He is also well known as a national presenter of arts in education.
Mr. Ahlstedt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in music education from the State University of New York at Fredonia, and completed his Master of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
Thomas Paul, a celebrated basso, has been widely acknowledged as one of the most vocally resplendent and musically versatile singers of his generation. Since his Carnegie Hall debut in 1961, he has distinguished himself with enduring success in an enormous concert and operatic repertoire.
For more than four decades he has been a frequent guest soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic,the Philadelphia Orchestra, and every other major symphony in North America under the most eminent conductors.
Festival affiliations include Aspen, Tanglewood, Mostly Mozart, Meadowbrook, Blossom, Caramoor, Carmel, Great Park, Hollywood Bowl, Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, and Lincoln Center's "Great Performers Series."
International engagements have included operatic and concert perormances in Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Zurich, Kiev, Helsinki, Shenyang, and Beijing in a wide repertoire including Bach's Passion According to St. Matthew, Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, Handel's Jephtha, the Shostakovich Symphonies 14 and 13 ("Babi Yar"), and major works of Haydn and Beethoven.
His many recordings display a rare verstaility with works by Bach, Beach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Carter, Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Rands, Schoenberg, and Varèse. A Sony Classcial CD with the Juilliard String Quartet of a unique solo vocal chamber version of Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Christ won a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music Recording of 1990.
A resident basso of New York City's Bach Aria Group, he developed the Bach Aria Study and Performance Festival at SUNY Stonybrook. He now devotes full attention to singing, private teaching, guest master classes, and solo recording projects.
Lucy Shelton, American soprano, is the winner of two Walter W. Naumburg Awards - for chamber music and solo singing - and enjoys a distinguished career with recital, chamber, opera, and orchestral performances worldwide of her vast repertoire ranging from Bach and Babbitt to Vivier and Vivaldi. As one of the foremost interpreters of today's composers, she has premiered more than 100 works, many of which have been written for her. Notable among these are Elliott Carter's song cycles Of Challenge Of Love and Tempo e Tempi, Oliver Knussen's Whitman Settings, Joseph Schwantner's Sparrows and Magabunda, Poul Ruder's The Bells, Mario Davidovsky's Romanceros, Stephen Albert's Flower of the Mountain, Charles Wuorinen's Fenton Songs II and Robert Zuidam's opera Rage d'Amours. She has premiered Gerard Grisey's L'Icone Paradoxiale with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Alexander Goehr's Sing Ariel (her Aldeburgh festival debut); sung Pierre Boulez's Le Visage Nuptial under the composer's direction in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Paris; toured the United States and South America in Bach's St. John Passion with Helmuth Rilling; and performed Gyorgy Kurtag's The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza in London, Vienna, and Berlin with pianist Andras Schiff.
Ms. Shelton has exhibited special skill in dramatic works, including Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigionero (her BBC Proms debut), Luciano Berio's Sequenza III and Passaggio with the Ensemble InterContemporain, Sir Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage (for Thames Television), Bernard Rands's Canti Lunatici, and staged performances of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (with Da Camera of Houston and eighth blackbird).
Her diverse recordings showcase works by Adolphe, Albert, Benson, Carter, Crawford Singer, Del Tredici, Goehr, Kim, Knussen, Messiaen, Rands, Schoenberg, Schwantner, and Stravinsky.
| CD1 | CANTI DEL SOLE | |
| 1.1 | Mattina | Morning |
| M'illumino d'immenso |
I fillwith light of immensity |
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GIUSEPPE UNAGARETTI |
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| 1.2 | The Dawn Verse | |
| The dark is dividing, the sun is coming past the wall. Day is at hand. Lift your hand, say Farewell! Say Welcome! Then be silent. Let the darkness leave you, let the light come into you. Man in the twilight . |
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D.H. LAWRENCE |
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| 1.3 | from The Masque of the Twelve Months | |
Shine out, fair Sun, with all your heat. Shine out, and make this winter night |
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ANONYMOUS 12th C. |
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| 1.4 | from Soleil et Chair | from Sun and Flesh |
Le Soleil, le foyer de tendresse et de vie, Et tout crôit, et tout monte! |
The Sun, hearth of tenderness and life, And everything grows, and everything rises! |
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ARTHUR RIMBAUD |
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| 1.5 | Portami il girasole | Bring Me the Sunflower |
Portami il grasole ch'io lo traianti
Portami tu, la pianta che conduce |
Bring me the sunflower so that I can transplant it Obscure things tend towards clearness, Bring me the plant which leads to where |
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EUGENIO MONTALE |
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| 1.6 | from Vision and Prayer | |
| I turn the corner of prayer and burn In a blessing of the sudden Sun. In the name of the damned I would turn back and run To the hidden land But the loud sun Christens down The sky. I Am found O let him Scald me and down Me in his world's wound. His lightning answers my Cry. My voice burns in his hand. Now I am lost in the blinding One. The sun roars at the prayer's end. |
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DYLAN THOMAS |
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| 1.7 | Frutetto | Orchard |
| Sono tre calabroni che saggiano la pera: vi affondano le corna. Scavao un buco fino a succhiarne la polpa. Quando il sole si sposta, dalla parte del sole cavano un altro occhio. Chiama la gente queste le piante della sorte: come piccoli teschi pendono le zuccone dagli alberi funesti. |
There are three hornets Sipping the pears, They plunge in their horns And dig a hole Till the flesh is sucked. When the sun moves round, On that sunny side They dig another eye The people call these The fate-plants: Like small skulls The shells hang From the dark trees. |
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LEONARDO SINISGALLI |
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| 1.8 | Futility | |
Move him into the sun - Think how it wakes the seeds - |
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WILFRED OWEN |
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| 1.9 | September | September |
Noch nister die Sonne im Duft. Im Kielwasser alter Johre zeiht Die Pappeln erglänzen Silberchauer. |
Still the sun nests in the scent. In the wake of old years Poplars grow in the silver shower. |
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PETER HÜCHEL |
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| 1.10 | November by the Sea | |
Now in November nearer comes the sun At the base of the lower brain The wide sea winds, and the dark |
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D.H. LAWRENCE |
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| 1.11 | Fadensonmen | Thread Suns |
| über der grauschwarzen Ödnis. ein baum - hoher Gedanke greift sich den Lichtton: es sind noch Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen. |
above the grey-black wilderness a tree - high thought tunes in to light's pitch: there are still songs to be sung on the other side of mankind. |
|
PAUL CELAN |
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| 1.12 | Harmonie du Soir | Evening Harmony |
Voici venir les temps oû vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur sévapore ainsi qu'un encensoir; Le violon frémit comme un coeur qúon afflige; Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir, |
This is the time where each vibrating flower, Each flower, like a censer, breathes its scent; The violin quivers, like a heart that suffers; A heart that hates the Nothing's black extent, |
|
CHARLES BEAUDELAIRE |
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| 1.13 | The Sunset Verse | |
Leave off! Leave off! Leave off! |
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D.H. LAWRENCE |
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| 1.14 | Ed è Subito Sera | And in no Time it's Evening |
Ognunuo sta solo sul cuor della terra |
Each one stands alone on the heart of the earth pierced thr0ugh by a ray of sunlight: and in no time it's evening. |
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SALVATORE QUASIMODO |
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| CH1 | CANTI LUNATICI | |
| 1.15 | Ed è Subito Sera | And in no Time it's Evening |
| Ognunuo sta solo sul cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio de sole: ed è subito sera. |
Each one stands alone on the heart of the earth pierced thr0ugh by a ray of sunlight: and in no time it's evening. |
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SALVATORE QUASIMODO |
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| 1.16 | Simples | |
O bella bionda. Sei come l'onda! Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild A moondew stars her hanging hair Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear |
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JAMES JOYCE |
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| 1.17 | Welcome to the Moon | |
| Welcome, precious stone of the night, Delight of the skies, precious stone of the night, Mother of stars, precious stone of the night , Child reared by the sun, precious stone of the night, Excellency of stars, precious stone of the night. |
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ANONYMOUS, FROM THE GAELIC |
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| 1.18 | La Luna Asoma | The Moon Appears |
Cuando sale la luna Cuando sale la luna, Nadje come naranjas Cuando sale la luna |
When the moon comes out, When the moon comes out, No one eats oranges When the moon of one hundred |
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FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA |
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| 1.19 | from Moonland | from Moon Sand |
| Ein in sich gekehrter Mond. Ein gepuderter Mond. Ein Mond der den Schein widerhallen und den Widerhall scheinen lässt. Ein Mond der hingegossen auf einem Wolkendivan ruht einer Wahndiva nicht unähnlich. ein Mond mit Gliedern auf kristallenen Liedern. Ein immiger unsinniger Mond. |
A moon turned in on itself. A powdered moon. A moon the echoes the shine And lets the echo shine. A moon that lies stretched out On a divan of clouds Like a cloud-cuckoo-diva. A moon with limbs Of crystal hymns. An intimate insane moon. |
|
HANS ARP |
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| 1.20 | The Moon | |
| The moon like a flower In heaven's high bower, With silent delight Sits and smiles on the night. |
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WILLIAM BLAKE |
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| 1.21 | Roamnce de la Luna, Luna | Ballad of the Moon, Moon |
| La luna vino a la fragua con su polisón de nardos. El niño la mira, mira. El niño la está mirando. En el aire commovido mueve la luna sus brazos y enseña, lúbrica y pura, sus seños de duro estado. |
The moon comes to the smithy in her tuberose crinoline. The child looks and looks at her. The child is looking at her. In the agitated air the moon moves her arms and discloses, voluptuous, pure, her breasts of hard tin. |
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FREDERICO GARCIA LORCA |
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| 1.22 | from Moonsand | from Moon Sand |
| Ein grosses Mondtreffen ist anberaumt worden. Monde und alles was mit dem Mond zu tun har, werden sich da einstellen. mondquellen, befiederte Monde, Mondglocken, weisse Monde mit diamentenem Nabel, Monde mit Handgriffen aus elfenbein, winzige Mondlakaien, die über alles gerne Polstermöbel mit kochened heissen wasser begiessen, grössenwahnsinnige Rosen, die sich für einem Mond halten. Weisse Monde, die schwarze Trä nen weinen, Mondangramme, die beinahe ausschliessich aus Anna bestehen und denen nur einige Gramme Mond beigefügt wurden. Ein Monkonglomerat von silbernen Zweigen, das sich silbern weiterverzweigt und an dem Mondfrü chte reifen, Ein nackter Mond, wie alle Monde nackt, jodoch mit einem hut, an dem ein Feigenblatt befestigt ist. |
A great moon-meeting has been arranged. Moons and everyting to do with the moon will be present. moonsprings, feathered moons, Moonbells, White moons with diamond navels, moons with ivory handles, tiny moon-flunkeys who love more than anything To pour boiling hot water over upholstered furniture, Megalomaniac roses that think they are moons. White moons weeping black tears, moonanagrams consisting almost entirely of Anna and which have had added to them only a couple of grams of moon. A moon-conglomoration of silver branches branching out all silver on which moon fruits ripen A naked moon, naked like all moons, but with a hat, on which a fig leaf is fastened. |
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HANS ARP |
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| 1.23 | The Moon | |
| Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down the night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. |
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WALT WHITMAN |
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| 1.24 | from The Moon and the Yew Tree | |
| The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky - Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection. At the end, they soberly bong out their names. |
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SYLVIA PLATH |
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| 1.25 | from Moonland | from Moon Sand |
| Ein Mond aus Blur. Ein Mond aus Schnee. Ein Mond der so tut als sei er unbeweglich aber unerwartet und im handumdrehen sich vor den Augen eines Mondträ umers in die bodenlose Tiefe fallen lässt um im gleichen Augenbick aus der bedenslower Tiefe hinter dem Mondträumer wider aufzutauchen strmm wildsiobern lächeldn. |
A moon of blood. A moon of snow. A moon that acts as if motionless but suddenly and in a flash falls into the bottomless abyss, before the eyes of a moon-dreamer to rise up again in the same instant from the bottomless abyss silent wild silver smiling. |
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HANS ARP |
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| 1.26 | Amer au goût ce soir, jaloux | Bitter tasting tonight |
De quelle obscire poufiasse Fielleuse lune sur la mer Dans l'obsurité fauleuse |
Jealous of some obscure tart, Rancorous moon on the sea. In the fabled dark |
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ANTOIN ARTAUD |
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| 1.27 | Moonrise | |
| I awoke in the Midsummer not-to-call night, in the white and the walk of the morning: The moon, dwindles and thinned to the fringe of a fingernail held to the candle. Or paring of paradisical fruit, lovely in waning but lusterless, Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain; A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly. This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily, Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me eyelid and eyelid of slumber. |
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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS |
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| 1.28 | The Waning Moon | |
| And, like a dying lady leanand pale, Who totters forth, wrapped in gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky East, A white and shapeless mass. |
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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY |
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| 1.29 | Finita è la Notte | The Night is Done |
Finita è notte e la luna Come sei più lontana della luna, |
The night is done, the moon How you are more distant than the moon, |
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SALVATORE QUASIMODO |
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| CD2 | CANTI DELL'ECLISSE | |
| 2.1 | from Cantico delle Creature | from Song of the Creatures |
Laudato sie, mi Signore, cun tutte le tue creature Laudatosi, mi Signore, per sora luna e le stelle, |
Be praised, my Lord, with all your creatures, Be praised, my Lord, for sister moon and the stars, |
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ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI |
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| 2.2 | An Eclipse | |
| When God reveals his plan to men, Straight is the way to glory then And good the end for all; And God can from the murky night Create inviolable light Or hide the stainless day from sight Beneath a black cloud's pall. |
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PINDAR (TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK BY C.M. BOWRA |
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| 2.3 | La Révolution en Êté | The Summer Revolution |
| La lumiètre est excessive, les hommes courent âcheter des foulards, et ce nést pas pour se moucher. Derniet recours: l'éclipse, acrobtie céleste. Dans le carnaval cosmique, cet homme qui prend au serieux son rôle de planète. On brûle le soleil en effigie ironie du sort, plaisanterie d'esclaves. |
Too much light. Men run around buying scarves, and it's not to blow their noses in. Last recourse: eclipse, celestial acrobatics. In the cosmic carnival this man who takes his role as planet seriously. They're burning the sun in effigy, irony of fate, a slave's joke. |
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RENÈ DAUMAL |
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| 2.4 | from Samson Agonistes | |
O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon The sun to me is dark |
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JOHN MILTON |
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| 2.5 | from A Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duca Di Mantova | from To Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantova |
| Ben veggio il sol, ma qual talora il cinse oscuro velo in tenebroso eclissi; e veggio in cielo i lumi erranti e fissi: ma chi d'atro pallor cosi li tinse? |
Indeed I see the sun, but as he is when a dark veil wraps him in shadowy eclipse; and I see the fixed and wandering stars in heaven: but who has stained them like that with gloomy pallor? |
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TOQUATO TASSO |
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| 2.6 | Eclipse | |
| When the moon's immortal glow Is eclipsed (and there is no Other star in all the skies Such catastrophes befall) 'Tis as if some lovely lass Spies her image in a glass And, in envious surprise, Turns the mirror to the wall. |
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AL-GHASSANI (TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY A.J. ARBERRY) |
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| 2.7 | Ed è Subito Sera | And in no Time it's Evening |
| Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio di sole: ed è subito sera. |
Each one stands alone on the heart of the earth pierce through by a ray of sunlight: and in no time it's evening. |
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SALVATORE QUASIMODO |
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| 2.8 | Eclipse | |
Sunset at Night - is natural - Eclipses be - predicted - |
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EMILY DICKINSON |
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| 2.9 | A*** | A*** |
| Tu es mon amour depuis tant d'années, Mon vertige devant tant d'attente, Que rien ne peut viellir froider; Méme ce qui attendait notre mort, Ou lentement sur nous combattre, Méme ce qui nous est étrander, Er mes éclipses et mes retoures. |
You have been my love for many years, my giddiness before so much waiting Which nothing can age or cool; Even that which awaited our death, Or slowly learned how to fight us. Even that which is strange to us, Both my eclipses and my returns. |
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RENÉ CHAR |
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| 2.10 | This Precipice Garden | |
| ECLIPSED WORLD, revealed to me, for you I'll find a tranquil universe starred with time and solitude. |
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JAMES DEPRIEST |
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| 2.11 | from Arbol Adentro: Cuattro Chopos | from The Tree Inside: Four Poplars |
| Entre ser y no ser la yerbatitubea, los elementos se aligeran, los contornos se esfuman, visos reflejos, reverberaciones, centellear de formas y presencias, niebla de imágenes, eclipses, esto que veo somos espejeos. |
Between being and non-being the grass wavers, the elements become lighter, outlines shade over, glimmers, reflections, reverberations flashes of forms and presences, image mist, eclipses: what I see, we are: mirages. |
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OCTAVIO PAZ |
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| 2.12 | Zeitgehoft | Zeitgehoft |
ICH ALBERE mit meiner Nacht, lad du mir auch deine auch die soll es hören, |
I FOOL ABOUT with my night, your darkness too it too is to hear it |
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PAUL CELAN |
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| 2.13 | The Eclipse | |
| Whither, O whitHer didst Thou fly? When did I grieve Thine holy eye? When Thou didst mourn to see me lost, And all Thy care and counsels crossed. O do not grieve, whe'er Thou art! Thy grief is an undoing smart, Which doth not only pain, but break My heart, and makes me blush to speak. Thy anger I could kiss, and will; But O Thy grief, Thy grief, doth kill! |
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HENRY VAUGHAN |
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Recorded March 20-22, 2000
Sonic Temple Studio, Roslindale, Massachusetts
Jeff Gordon, recording engineer, mastering, editing
Matthew Packwood, editing
Robert Schuneman, executive producer
Gil Rose, producer
© 2008 ARSIS Audio