Cygnus Ensemble

While watching the youtube tour, listen to Harold Meltzer's introduction to readings of Brion excerpts at Vassar College, February,2007:    (start both; the two will run simultaneously.)

 Hear the recording of Cygnus playing Meltzer's Brion live at Merkin, April 23, 2008:

Composer bios:   Harold Meltzer    Yehudi Wyner     Chester Biscardi     Mario Davidovsky 

Click Here for Wyner & Davidovsky interviews on youtube 

Hear excerpts of Yehudi Wyner's Oboe Quartet 

Program Details:
April 23, 8PM at Merkin Hall

Harold Meltzer's Brion & works by Wyner, Davidovsky, Biscardi

featuring soloists:
soprano Tony Arnold, Robert Ingliss, oboe;  Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
with Daniel Panner, guest violist, Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinet, Joan Forsyth, guest pianist, James Baker, conductor  

 Program

• Brion by Harold Meltzer for tutti Cygnus (first performance)  Carlo Scarpa's Brion-youtube tour

• Oboe Quartet by Yehudi Wyner  (now under construction--Wyner Oboe Quartet web tour.)

• Romancero by Mario Davidovsky, featuring soprano Tony Arnold   Romancero is a group of settings of traditional Spanish poems, offering a foretaste of  Davidovsky's work in progress for Cygnus--setting of Hebrew love poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, utilizing banjo, mandolin, guitar, winds and strings.                        "Moving with impeccable precision through the angular leaps and unpredictable melodic turns of Davidovsky's song cycle "Romancero,'' soprano Tony Arnold brought witty seductiveness to the opening song ... accompanied by a small ensemble, her austere "Sad was King David'' was moving, each carefully shaped note glowing like a teardrop in the slow, widely spaced melody."-----Wynne Delacoma, classical music critic, Chicago Sun-Times - 4/29/2002

• Traverso by Chester Biscardi
    “Biscardi’s music is clear-line and remarkably accessible in its expressivity.” - Fanfare Magazine

   

  “All the works by Biscardi share a common ground in that they are expressive, sensitive and convincing.” - American Record Guide 

Pre-Raphaelite II

Featuring The Creation, A Townley Mystery Play by Frank Brickle; Electric Counterpoint, with 15 live guitars, by Steve Reich, and works by Biscardi, Lang, Anderson, Coughlin, Wilson.

Click here for guided tour

March 8, 2008, 8:30PM
Weill Hall, at Carnegie Hall
Cygnus, with Haleh Abghari, mezzo soprano; Liana Stillman, soporano; Nehemiah Luckett, baritone

This program features the first performance of Frank Brickle's chamber opera The Creation, A Townley Mystery Play. 

In this treatment of the creation myth, as God creates the world,  Brickle recreates music through references to music of the past.   Brickle finds this work bringing him into the aesthetic world of the Pre-Raphaelites. He elaborates:

"The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood agreed on four principles:

1.    To have genuine ideas to express;  2.    To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3.    To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt inprevious art, to the exclusion of what is conventional andself-parodying and learned by rote;  4.    And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

"Note what's missing from this picture: self-expression. I'd venture to say that the essence of the Pre-Raphaelite strain is not self-expression, but rather to use the self to express and reflect something powerful in everyone, from experiences available to any of us. That is one reason why they so often chose subjects from mythology or mythic history: they are the stories that everyone knows."  

Brickle's work serves as a centerpiece for a program of works that are both in sympathy and opposition to the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility.