Michael Hennagin - Sunrise | notes by Gary D. Cannon

 

Michael Hennagin (1936–1993) was a student of Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He began his professional career composing music for Hollywood, but eventually settled for twenty years (1972–92) as a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma. Hennagin composed for orchestra, ballet, choir, and chamber ensemble, and developed a close relationship with New York–based professional choir The Gregg Smith Singers. His cycle Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun, on texts by Walt Whitman, is melodic and gratifyingly written for the voices. The second movement, “Sunrise,” emphasizes the poet’s repeated plea: “Give me…”

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Jake Runestad - Wild Forces | bio notes by Christopher M. Hathaway

 

Jake Runestad, born in 1986 in Rockford, Illinois, became interested in composition at a very young age, but did not join a choir until his first year at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. At WSU he studied under acclaimed composer Libby Larsen. He went on to attend graduate school at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University; he received his Masters of Music in Composition in 2011 and has since found his way into prominence in the choral community.

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Runestad has since been regarded as “stirring and uplifting” by the Miami Herald and “highly imaginative” by the Baltimore Sun. He was awarded the 2016 Morton Gould Young Composer award by the ASCAP Foundation, and received the McKnight Fellowship in 2017.

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Wild Forces is the second movement of Runestad's choral Cycle, The Hope of Loving. The piece, evoking a sound like stampeding horses, uses the words of St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic saint associated with the natural environment and the patronage of animals. The composer writes, "I am a hoarder of poetry and one of my favorite collections is Love Poems From God — mystical poems by Daniel Ladinsky inspired by famous writers from around the world. This book is a composer’s dream with colorful, powerful, and succinct writings that talk of living fully, deep spirituality, self-contemplation, and love. When starting my work on this new composition, I opened Ladinsky’s book to find a treasure trove of quaint parables and sage advice for us all."
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Ola Gjeilo - Tundra | notes by the composer

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Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978) began playing and composing when he was five years old. He studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music, Juilliard and the Royal College of Music in London. He writes primarily choral music, but has also written for piano and for wind symphony. He currently resides in New York.

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The lyrics for Tundra were written by my frequent collaborator, poet Charles Anthony Silvestri. I asked Tony to write a text based on the title and photos of a part of my native Norway that is very dear to me, the Hardangervidda mountain plateau. It’s pretty close to where my father grew up, in the mountains between Oslo and Bergen. Hardangervidda is quite barren and intensely beautiful—it is easy to feel that you are treading on sacred land, which Tony describes so evocatively in his text.

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Morten Lauridsen - Lux Aeterna | notes by the composer

 

Born in Colfax, Washington, Morten Lauridsen was designated “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006, and he received the National Medal for the Arts in 2007. 
 

Each of the connected movements in this choral cycle contains references to “Light,” assembled from various sacred Latin texts. I composed Lux Aeterna in response to my mother’s final illness and found great personal comfort and solace in setting to music these timeless and wondrous words about Light, a universal symbol of illumination at all levels - spiritual, artistic, and intellectual.

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The work opens and closes with the beginning and ending of the Requiem Mass... The instrumental introduction to the Introitus softly recalls motivic fragments from two pieces especially close to my heart (my settings of Rilke’s Contre Qui, Rose and O Magnum Mysterium) which recur throughout the work in various forms. Several new themes in the lntroitus are then introduced by the chorus, including an extended canon on et lux perpetua.

 

... O Nata Lux and Veni, Sancte Spiritus are paired songs, the former an a cappella motet at the center of the work and the latter a spirited, jubilant canticle. A quiet  setting  of the Agnus Dei precedes the final Lux Aeterna, which reprises the opening section of the Introitus and concludes with a joyful celebratory Alleluia. — Morten Lauridsen

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Randall Thompson - Choose Something Like a Star | notes by Mark Arnest

 

Like his illustrious colleagues John Rutter and Morten Lauridsen, Randall Thompson (1899-1984) is known almost entirely for his choral music.... Thompson’s life centered on academia. As a youth he attended the elite Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where his father was an English teacher. His undergraduate studies were at Harvard, followed by a year studying with composer Ernest Bloch. He taught choir at Wellesley College; received a doctorate in music from the Eastman School of Music; and spent the rest of his career teaching music at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Virginia, and at Harvard University. His students included such illustrious figures as Leonard Bernstein and Frederic Rzewski, and he became known as “the dean of American choral composers.”

 

The plainness of Thompson’s life and art makes him an ideal person to set to music the poetry of Robert Frost (1874-1963), which is generally straightforward and devoid of fancy allusions. (The exception is the reference to “Keats’s “Eremite”: Here Frost makes explicit the relation between his poem and Keats’s Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, in which a star is compared to a sleepless hermit, watching the world “with eternal lids apart.”)

 

The sublime song "Choose Something Like a Star" is arguably the best number in Thompson's Frostiana. The text-setting is masterful, though sometimes awkward for the singers, with an especially cruel soprano part. Two examples are the musical ascent on the word “height,” and Thompson’s placing the climax on the the word “choose” in the penultimate line.

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Thompson has never been a particularly popular composer; but neither has his music ever disappeared from programs. The secret of his quiet durability is the craftsmanship and sensitivity to words that he always brought to his music.

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Lili Boulanger - Vieille Prière Bouddhique | notes by  Allison Sniffin & Cynthia Powell

 

Ill from the age of twelve, and fragile for the rest of her brief life (she died at age 25), Lili Boulanger's precocious musical career took off when her cantata Faust et Hélène won the Prix de Rome in 1913 at the age of 19. Her sister Nadia, who was to become the most influential composition teacher of the 20th-century, had tried for the much-coveted prize several times and lost. Lili’s triumph made her the darling of Parisian musical circles and the first woman to win first prize in the hugely influential contest. Curiously, in the eyes of an admiring public still uncomfortable with female success, she was the mythical persona of a sickly and suffering ingénue embued with divinely-inspired powers (an image stoked by the press, and nurtured by Nadia, which turned especially cultic after her death.) But the image was false. Lili was a hard-working composer whose flesh-and-blood intellect is evident on closer inspection of her work. 

 

The atmosphere of the opening ancient Buddhist prayer hovers between stark open-5ths and a Debussyian palette of altered 7th-chords. As the universe unfolds, the choir calls over this undulating sound-world with two melodies: one in cascading whole-tones and another in a two-note chant (which will become more and more urgent and impassioned as the piece goes on). 

 

Next, the flute illumines the way to an Eden-like paradise where a solo tenor portrays humanity’s presence in the prayer. The landscape of harmony that supports him is similar to that of the beginning but there has occurred a new element: rich, altered-7th chords supplant the open-5ths, introducing color and complexity. 

 

What follows is a remarkable orchestral effect under the chanted verse, “each in his own way,” in which each instrument diverges softly from a central chord to arrive at the opening sound-world of the beginning.

 

There is a moment of stillness before the worldly and divine collide on the words “let every being that exists” in a brilliant crash of color and mixed tonality heralded by the trumpet. Then the melodies come fast and furious, echoing each other in canon, converging in a grand unison. The choir, transformed, ecstatically cries its two-note chant, gradually gaining speed and momentum like the spinning prayer wheels of Buddhist temples. The trombone plummets chromatically, pulling the frenzied gyre down to the central key, coalescing and collapsing the prayer before it explodes in a final, delirious “Ah!”

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Dan Forrest - Alway Something Sings

Dan Forrest (b. 1978) is an award-winning choral composer who earned his composition doctorate from the University of Kansas. Since his first publication in 2001, his pieces have become firmly established in the repertoire of choirs in the U.S. and abroad.

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In "Alway Something Sings," the grandeur of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "skyborn music" text creates a canvas for Forrest's magnificent sonorities; the piece is breathtaking in its beauty and imagery.

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Artist's Bios

CYNTHIA POWELL, Conductor and Artistic Director, celebrates her 19th season with the Stonewall Chorale.  A graduate of Westminster Choir College, she has worked with many musical groups in the NY metropolitan area and has conducted major works for chorus and orchestra. She has served on the guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, led the St. George's Choral Society in NYC, and was a guest conductor at the International Choral Festival in Havana, Cuba. She is also the Artistic Director of Melodia Women’s Choir, and currently serves as Organist/Choirmaster of Temple Sinai in Tenafly, NJ. Her passion for music and commitment to the choral art is coupled with a desire to generate awareness and funds for timely causes, and she has produced recitals, oratorios and concerts to benefit Bailey House, a homeless residence for people with AIDS, for Doctors Without Borders, the Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan, and Water is Life, Kenya. 

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ERIC SEDGWICK, Pianist, has performed with many of music’s top talents including Leona Mitchell, Sanford Sylvan and Marni Nixon, Broadway leading ladies Sarah Rice, Carole Demas and Debra Monk, and English hornist Thomas Stacy of the New York Philharmonic. A frequent performer and collaborator in the NYC area, he is also a vocal coach at the Manhattan School of Music and the faculty collaborative pianist for the Tanglewood Music Center. He has served as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the batons of Michael Tilson Thomas, Bramwell Tovey, John Williams and Andris Nelsons. He is a regular pianist for events with the Metropolitan Opera Guild, and has worked for Carnegie Hall’s Music Education Workshops with Joyce DiDonato, as well as for the International Vocal Arts Institutes in New York and Montreal, and for Beth Morrison Projects. For ten years he was the music director for the Junior Opera Theater scenes program at Manhattan School of Music, directed by Catherine Malfitano. On the west coast, he has been a longtime coach and music director for the OperaWorks training program in Los Angeles.

 

Mr. Sedgwick is the official pianist for the Art Song Preservation Society in New York, a group whose regular masterclass series has included Dalton Baldwin, Thomas Grubb, Margaret Lattimore and Joan Dornemann. He performs regularly with local groups in New York including Opera Singers Initiatives, the Stonewall Chorale, La Forza dell’Opera, and the Halcyon chamber music series, and has been featured in the Center for Contemporary Opera concert series, the 2019 Ukranian Contemporary Music Festival and OmniARTS productions. He has appeared often with the Broadway Concerts Direct performances in upstate New York, in cabaret shows at 54 Below and the Metropolitan Room, and as music director/pianist for “The World According to Kurt Weill” and “Jarmila
Novotná: Her Life in Song” at UrbanStages. He can be heard in the PBS series “The Heart of Art” as well as on the soundtracks for the
prize-winning short films “Connection Lost (The Tinder Opera),” “Something Blue (The Bachelor Opera)” and “Someone Like Me (The Facebook Opera).” He was a winner of the Boston Steinway piano competition and has premiered new works by composers SeymourBarab, J. Mark Stambaugh, Joelle Wallach, and Louis Hardin. He is a graduate of Manhattan School of Music and Brown University.