Ned Rorem: Our Town
Monadnock Music, Soloists, Gil Rose
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Monadnock Music, Soloists, Gil Rose
Description
This is the world-premiere recording of Ned Rorem's (b. 1923) acclaimed setting of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, one of the best-known plays of the 20th century and a staple of every US household.
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.
Tracklisting
Sarah Hennies
Ostrava New Orchestra, Owen Underhill, Ostravska Banda, Petr Kotik, Elision Ensemble, Arditti Quartet, Switch~ Ensemble, Jason Thorpe Buchanan
James Martin, Lynn Raley
Peter Gena
New World
New World
Mivos Quartet
Twilight String Orchestra; Fahad Siadat
William Vann, Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Derek Welton, Iain Burnside
Basler Madrigalisten; Raphael Immoos
Proteus Ensemble; Stephen Shellard
William Vann, Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Jamie Andrews, Ashley Riches
The Brabant Ensemble / Stephen Rice
Soloists; l'arpa festante
Latvian Radio Choir
Camerata Silesia, Anna Szostak