Kelley O'Connor & Robert Spano - Songs Of Orpheus (2025) [Official Digital Download 24/192]

At once sensual and existential, this collection of songs—composed across 125 years—meditates on nature and nostalgia, sex and love, the ephemerality of the human spirit, and the eternal, transformative power of art. These song cycles of Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, George Crumb, and Robert Spano coalesce into a testament to the limitless potency and fragility of love—both its resplendent joys and its tender sorrows. Despite love’s transience and riskiness, the album compels us to ruminate on Rilke’s witticism that “for one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…"

Each of the cycles presents us with existential questions of life and death, love and loss, but the album is structured in couplets. Debussy and Spano draw upon Ancient Greece, Grieg and Crumb draw upon enchantments of nature, the temporality of love, life, and memory. Claude Debussy’s ethereal Chansons de Bilitis (1899) evokes a lusty, Grecian fever dream where the tumescence of love and desire comes to the fore. Robert Spano’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2020) lends voice to Rilke’s enigmatic eponymous poetry. Spano’s setting of the songs—the intimate conversation between piano and soprano—“draws one voice out of two separate strings.” Meanwhile, George Crumb’s Three Early Songs (1947) emerge as whispered secrets, darkly-hued odes to impermanent nature—night, a flower, and wind. The songs lead us to ponder the difference between the actual and the seeming.

Tracklist:
01. Debussy- Chansons De Bilitis- I. La flûte de Pan
02. Debussy- Chansons De Bilitis- II. La chevelure
03. Debussy- Chansons De Bilitis- III. Les tombeau des Naïades
04. Spano- Sonnets to Orpheus- I. Da stieg ein Baum
05. Spano- Sonnets to Orpheus- II. Ein Gott vermags
06. Spano- Sonnets to Orpheus- III. Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht
07. Spano- Sonnets to Orpheus- IV. Heil dem Geist, der uns verbinden mag
08. Spano- Sonnets to Orpheus- V. Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen
09. Crumb- Three Early Songs- I. Night
10. Crumb- Three Early Songs- II. Let It Be Forgotten
11. Crumb- Three Early Songs- III. Wind Elegy
12. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- I. Det syng
13. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- II. Veslemøy
14. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- III. Bläbær-Li
15. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- IV. Møte
16. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- V. Elsk
17. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- VI. Killingdans
18. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- VII. Vond Dag
19. Grieg- Haugtussa, op. 67- VIII. Bed Gjætle-Bekken


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