Adamo: Late Victorians; Regina Coeli; Alcott Music; Overture to Lysistrata

Pulley (Artist), Sullivan (Artist), Levalier (Artist), Mark Adamo (Composer), Alimena (Conductor), Eclipse Chamber Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Eclipse Chamber Orchestra
• Conductor: Alimena
• Composer: Mark Adamo
• Audio CD (November 17, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: NAXOS AMERICAN
• ASIN: B002QEXBUO
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #112,714 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

WOSU89.7 Classical e-NOTES, Jennifer Hambrick, December 1, 2009

Sounds of Sorrow, Sounds of Hope: Classical Music for World AIDS Day

...Mark Adamo's Late Victorians, a work of uncertain genre whose text (a pastiche created from Richard Rodriguez's Harper's Magazine essay "Late Victorians" and poems by Emily Dickinson) is a mini-drama of San Francisco life in the age of AIDS. Naxos has recently released the world-premiere recording of this work in a performance by soprano Emily Pulley and journalist and blogger Andrew Sullivan in the narrator's role, with the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra under Sylvia Alimena. Adamo's Late Victorians came about after what the composer describes as a tortuous creative process, one which began happily enough with a commission, then rode rapidly into blank slate territory. "I could not write," Adamo begins the notes that accompany the world-premiere recording of Late Victorians. "I had been asked to write: the project was to be a set of songs for mezzo-soprano. But I could not write." The thrilling terror of filling that blank slate hadn't stayed Adamo's hand; it was something altogether more somber. "We - I and thirty other people from my church, an ad-hoc hospice - had just buried Bob, a man we hardly knew until he fell ill with AIDS," Adamo continued. "And Don, whom I had just directed in an opera, was failing. The things that seemed unacceptable to me were how ordinary this was all becoming." Adamo had read Richard Rodriguez's 1990 essay "Late Victorians," a piece Adamo describes as "a memoir of San Francisco in the first years of the plague." The essay haunted him. "I carried that essay with me everywhere the winter of 1992. But I couldn't set it. It was too long: too much. I didn't want to write this experience. I didn't recall choosing to witness it. I needed to write this song cycle, and I could not." The work that was to be a song cycle for mezzo-soprano ended up a music drama for orchestra, narrator (who speaks sections of Rodriguez's essay) and soprano (who sings Dickinson's poetry). The form of Late Victorians unfolds in four seactions, each a day-in-the-life vignette, which the narrator declaims against an orchestral backdrop. The soprano role is a sort of poetic Doppelgänger of the narrator, her language the exalted yet still painfully truthful poetry of Emily Dickinson. The vignettes themselves convey emptiness ("The painter left one afternoon, saying he would return the next day, leaving behind his tubes, his brushes, his sponges and rags. He never returned ;") gallows humor ("If he's lucky, he's got a year, a doctor told me. If not, he's got two;") grief ("I stood aloof at Cesar's memorial service: the kind of party he would enjoy, everybody said;") and, finally, hope - not hope that people will stop dying of AIDS, but that others will be there to care for them as and when they do ("Sometimes no family came. Or parents came but left without reconciliation, some preferring to say cancer. But others came. Nurses, nuns, the couple from next door. They washed his dishes, they walked his dog.") In Adamo's hands, the social dissonance of the painter who never returned to finish the job is at once beautiful and full of a certain sweetly bereft questioning: And here's what hope sounds like, as neighbors and friends of the dying step in to make his journey to the grave less lonely, even if no less difficult: In other words, Late Victorians unfolds how living with AIDS - or living without AIDS, for that matter - unfolds: moment by moment, in a process that moves in one and only one direction. To Adamo, the form of the finished piece is like the Stations of the Cross. "In the Catholic churches I knew growing up, you will often find twelve friezes, or sculptures, representing Christ's journey to Calvary and, beyond, to transformation," Adamo writes. "During Lent, the faithful walk from frieze to frieze; meditate upon the image; and move on. The images themselves are static... It is the pilgrim who is dynamic, making the journey from image to image, walking the walk." The walk of the AIDS sufferer is different in the details from that of one who does not bear this cross. Adamo's Late Victorians is a powerful a reminder of the ravages of AIDS, and it no less powerfully calls upon us to admit, as did John Donne, that anyone's death diminishes us, because we are involved with humankind.

Product Description

Acclaimed as 'one of the
best opera composers of
the moment,' American
composer-librettist
Mark Adamo has also
ventured into symphonic
composition, in which his
theatrical sensitivity, political commitment and musical mastery are equally evident. Late Victorians
is dedicated both to the memory of the victims of AIDS, and to those who have survived.

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Beauty of Remembrance, December 8, 2009

By 

Tym S. (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adamo: Late Victorians; Regina Coeli; Alcott Music; Overture to Lysistrata (Audio CD)

"Late Victorians" is a great piece about a terrible thing. It is a sonic essay commemorating the losses of the AIDS plague in late 80's San Francisco. Composer Adamo evokes this in a theatrical collage of spoken word, operatic poetry, and bittersweet music. The narrative voice, based on Richard Rodriguez's essays, carries the tone of his spare, wise, sad clarity. Hardwon, wounded, a stark certainty come to from quiet, persistent, painful shifts. Stripped down to life and death, each moment becomes an epiphany, each memory a parting gift. Andrew Sullivan deftly narrates in harmony alongside soprano Emily Pulley, who instills melodic ease into unflinching lines from Emily Dickenson. Pulley in particular delivers a delicate balancing act of operatic beauty, witty phrasing, and topical modernity.

"Regina Coeli", adapted from Adamo's "Four Angels" concerto, brings Mother Mary into heaven. The sad ascendence of the strings blossoms into gossamer wonder by harpist Dotian Levalier. "Overture to Lysistrata" compresses his "Lysistrata" opera into three movements: the dramatic first driven and restless, a tumbling wind through every corner; the second lyrical and passionate, romantic in the sense of idealism; and the third a complex tonal strobe running fiercely. From his world-famed "Little Women" opera, Adamo streamlines "Alcott Music" into three character movements for orchestral voicing. Rich in the personalities of their character namesakes, they are a joy to the ear. A fine overview of an important new composer.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, Beautiful, Amazing, January 8, 2010

By 

Ellen Davis (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adamo: Late Victorians; Regina Coeli; Alcott Music; Overture to Lysistrata (Audio CD)

There's always such a sense of story in Adamo's music, even when there are no words involved. Regina Coeli, the luminous harp and strings piece, unfolds like a flower or a folk-tale: every note feels so right, even when you hear it the first time. I knew Little Women, and so enjoyed the suite, which sounds glamourous in this full-strings orchestration, but the Overture to Lysistrata was new to me, and sparkling: four joyous minutes of fizzing Champagne. The big piece, though, is Late Victorians, which is a kind of twenty-five solo opera in which the single character, remembering friends lost to AIDS, is played at once by a speaking man and a singing woman, while the friends he loses are evoked by instrumental soloists. Again, the story (not written, but assembled by Adamo from poetry of Emily Dickinson and prose of Richard Rodriguez) feels honest as your own diary, if you've ever lost someone to any tragedy at all: I can see a lot of people playing it late at night for solace. And what players! Andrew Sullivan is a grave, moving narrator, and Emily Pulley, the soprano, is a tender actress with a full, brilliant sound: I don't think I've ever heard a piannissimo like the clarinetist's in the first solo, and the hornist evokes memories of Dennis Brain. (Why aren't the players billed?) The conductor, Sylvia Alimena, makes every moment glow. A gorgeous, emotional record.

5.0 out of 5 stars Late Victorians, wearing modern garb, April 4, 2010

By 

Jim D. (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adamo: Late Victorians; Regina Coeli; Alcott Music; Overture to Lysistrata (Audio CD)

Here's a varied program by a leading American composer of our time, both tonal and contemporary in the music he creates. One movement from a full-length concerto has been scored as a standalone piece for harp and strings, while an overture to one opera is followed by a suite from another (the much-performed "Little Women").

"Late Victorians," the title work of the disc, takes a magazine essay on AIDS, its victims and survivors, and weaves around it the poetry of Emily Dickinson; two solo voices are featured, one spoken and one sung. In a way, it derives from Haydn's "Farewell" symphony, with its vanishing musicians, but though regret and bitterness are added to the mix here, the piece is all the more effective for its generally understated tone. Performances are assured, and the recording is mostly close and clear (the harp gets a little swimmy at times). Notes are by the composer himself, who you should know if you don't.