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Robert Beaser’s Songs from the Occasions Available on New Innova Recording

Jun. 27, 2012

Robert Beaser’s <em>Songs from the Occasions</em> Available on New Innova Recording

Innova has released Open House: Songs by William Bolcom and Robert Beaser, a dual compilation of the song cycles Songs from the Occasions by Robert Beaser, and Open House by Bolcom featuring tenor Paul Sperry. Sperry writes of Beaser’s Songs from the Occasions:

Every time I sang Songs from the Occasions I was amazed by the way Bob managed to make seven instruments sound like an orchestra. Sometimes, in rehearsals, I was so captivated by what they were playing I would forget to come in. I always had a soft spot in my heart for Motet XVI because I knew it was the closest I would ever come to singing Tosca.

Scored for tenor and chamber ensemble, Songs from the Occasions is set to six poems of the Italian Nobel Laureate Eugenio Montale from his epoch-making volume Le Occasioni. Beaser explains:

Although these dense, imagistic, almost hermetic poems have been described as being prophetic of the impending disaster looming over Europe in the pre-World War II era, they are also in the more immediate sense love poems, written to the mystery woman Clizia, who fate seems to have prematurely separated from the poet after a brief but intense liaison. As viewed from either of these two levels, the poems represent a powerful, searching voice in a world awash with turmoil and disarray.

Songs from the Occasions was commissioned by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra through a Nonesuch Commission Award in 1984 and saw its premiere in 1985 in St. Louis featuring tenor Paul Sperry and members from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

More on the music of Robert Beaser can be found at www.schott-music.com.

Details on the recording are located at www.innova.mu Order your copy on amazon.

Robert Beaser
Songs from the Occasions (1985)
for tenor and chamber ensemble
text from six poems by Eugenio Montale
fl.cl.hn-pno-vn.va.vc
24’