The Sleeves, Laura Pritchard
Just finished my 45-minute song cycle In This Blue Room for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano, for Lyric Fest’s March 13th and 15th concerts. I had a personal deadline of February 13th, so I’m happy to have beaten that by one day. Suzanne DuPlantis, Daniel Teadt, and Laura Ward have been receiving music from me since early January, and I’ll still fuss with it for a while, but it’s good to get to that last double bar.
I was thrilled to be asked to be part of this project, which is the centerpiece of my 2014-15 Composer in Residence position with Lyric Fest.
Seventeen songs in all, including three duets, are settings of poems by Julia Blumenreich, Susan Fleshman, Siobhan Lyons, and Donna Wolf-Palacio, which are in turn reflections on the batik artwork of Laura Pritchard. The character of the poems, and the haunting, edgy subtleties of the paintings, inspired a blues- and jazz-inflected drama about relationships, loneliness, and life in a whirling blue world.
More about the cycle, for now, is here. I’ll have more extensive program notes later on, but for now (barring anything dopey I run across) I’m happy to be in the editing & proofing stage! Thank you, Lyric Fest, I can’t wait to hear these!