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William Bolcom - Songs (Farley & Bolcom)

Posted By: tapaz9
William Bolcom - Songs (Farley & Bolcom)

William Bolcom - Songs (Farley & Bolcom)
Classical | EAC: FLAC+Cue+Log | 1 Cd, Cover+Booklet | 315 Mb
Label: Naxos - Date: 2005

This selection by Carole Farley of my songs covers forty years of my writing for both concert and theater. Not everyone can shift stylistic gears as easily and brilliantly as she from straight-out Broadway parody (Casino Paradise’s Night, Make My Day) to difficult art music (the I Will Breathe a Mountain cycle). Who but a courageous soprano would start a recording with a scream? Carole has begun her programme with You Cannot Have Me Now, from the 1969 opera for actors Greatshot, written for the Yale Repertory Theater in 1969; the character is a German war-bride in a marriedofficers’ neighbourhood on a military base, telling us of her and her husband’s wild goings-on among the brass and NCOs. A friend at Stanford met such a woman living at a California airbase, and Arnold Weinstein’s lyric stretches her story only slightly; the part about a ten-year duration is evidently true to life. Night, Make My Day, from the 1990 theatre opera Casino Paradise, is sung torchily by the young repressed spinster Cis anticipating a wedding night that, at the last minute, is snatched from her. Weinstein and I intended it as a sendup of a Liza Minnelli-ish over-the-top extravaganza, but the cabaret performer Karen Akers has performed it straight, to our amazement. Cis will reappear, telling us why her love life is so lonely, in My Father the Gangster.

When Marilyn Horne gave her farewell concert a few years ago (of concert and opera repertoire only; she still performs popular music wonderfully), she asked for a contribution. May Swenson’s The Digital Wonder Watch was the result; the poem celebrates her companion’s recent acquisition of a phenomenal multiuse timepiece.

My long-time friend and frequent collaborator the conductor Dennis Russell Davies began a project with the rock diva Marianne Faithfull involving my collaboration with the poet-playwright Frank McGuinness - of which this terrifying poem, The Last Days of Mankind, was the only song achieved.

Dan Wagoner is one of my favourite New York dancers; imagine William Blake’s spirit-portrait Glad Day come to life. His dancing has sometimes brought tears. Wagoner’s companion George Montgomery, a spare, laconic poet of last century’s postwar New York School, is, I am told, better known in Spanish translation than in English; Songs to Dance is a trio for singer, dancer, and piano that Dan, my wife Joan Morris, and I performed - only once - at New York’s Joyce Theater.

When Marilyn Horne asked for a cycle of songs from American women poets, she had already picked Emily Dickinson’s The Bustle in the House, which Marilyn had read at her brother’s funeral. I in turn asked my friend Alice Fulton to pick an anthology for me, including one of her own poems; I felt her choices would lend I Will Breathe a Mountain a special verbal topography – something I had also requested from the poet T. J. Anderson III for the choral cycle The Mask. The wide poetic range incorporates Edna St. Vincent Millay (in sonnet form), Fulton (in an evocation of her early womanhood in Troy, New York), the eminent African-American Gwendolyn Brooks, the febrile Anne Sexton, the 1920s bohemian HD (Hilda Doolittle), the Washington State poet Denise Levertov, Dickinson, the mid-century New York poet, and editor Louise Bogan, the same May Swenson of The Digital Wonder Watch, and finally the great Elizabeth Bishop in a slightly abridged rendering of The Fish.

My close friend the Memphis-born poet Richard Tillinghast is known both in the United States and in Ireland; Costa del Nowhere, a rueful encounter, is followed by Richard’s translation of The Table, from the eminent Turkish poet Cansever.

It has sometimes been tendered that William Blake’s poem Mary was inspired by his friend, the celebrated early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

The director Paul Sills, founder of the Second City troupe from which so very many prominent American actors sprang, and who had directed both our Dynamite Tonite and Greatshot, called desperately one day in 1980 to Arnold Weinstein and me to help: A young pair of producers planned to bring The Wind in the Willows to Broadway, and would we contribute a score? The two young men seemed particularly green to us – one of their ideas was a promotional button reading I’ve Been TOAD Away – and it was not long before Paul lost patience with them and quit the project (the two went on to commission a rock score, turning Badger into a female for ‘love interest’ and sponsoring the longest preview run ever on Broadway with their show, which closed immediately upon opening). A few years ago the painter-producer-director John Wulp would enlist musician Scott Griffin to arrange our existing songs into a score for a children’s production on the offshore Maine island North Haven.

And finally we come to the earliest song, from my first collaboration with Weinstein, When We Built the Church. Arnold’s and my working partnership was matchmade by Darius Milhaud, who had met Weinstein in Florence and passed me a libretto (then called A Comedy of Horrors) one day in 1960 after class in Paris. I immediately wanted to set it because of its beautiful balance of the colloquial and classical, a specialty of Arnold’s. Retitled Dynamite Tonite, the work employed singing actors - I must say I did not realise while composing it how more apropos they would be than ‘straight’ singers – and the short-lived Actors Studio Theater produced the show in 1963. Dynamite is less an anti-war piece than a Marx-Brothersish dramma giocoso about war; Alvin Epstein, the Sergeant squirreled in a bunker with the Captain during an endless conflict nobody remembers the reason for, sings this wistful memorial for his bombed church.
William Bolcom
Tracks:

01. Greatshot: You Cannot Have Me Now - or, The Military Orgy [0:05:23.00]
02. Casino Paradise: Night Make My Day [0:02:17.00]
03. The Digital Wonder Watch (An Advertisment) [0:03:05.01]
04. Casino Paradise: My Father the Gangster [0:02:33.01]
05. The Last Days of Mankind [0:03:33.00]
06. Songs to Dance: I. This is a face [0:00:51.01]
07. Songs to Dance: II. Since I have met you [0:00:52.00]
08. Songs to Dance: III. The rabbit [0:01:01.01]
09. Songs to Dance: IV. I am not free [0:00:47.01]
10. Songs to Dance: V. For me there is no song [0:00:37.01]
11. Songs to Dance: VI. From wandering in the forest [0:01:03.74]
12. Songs to Dance: VII. Beware [0:00:43.01]
13. Songs to Dance: VIII. I wouldn't die without love [0:00:43.01]
14. Songs to Dance: IX. I remember [0:00:41.00]
15. Songs to Dance: X. For everything turned false [0:00:34.00]
16. Songs to Dance: XI. I have climbed [0:01:16.01]
17. I Will Breathe a Mountain: I. Pity Me Not Because the Light of Day [0:02:07.00]
18. I Will Breathe a Mountain: II. How to Swing those Obbligatos Around [0:01:39.00]
19. I Will Breathe a Mountain: III. The Crazy Women [0:02:05.01]
20. I Will Breathe a Mountain: IV. Just Once [0:01:28.00]
21. I Will Breathe a Mountain: V. Never More Will the Wind [0:01:22.01]
22. I Will Breathe a Mountain: VI. The Sage [0:01:26.01]
23. I Will Breathe a Mountain: VII. O to Be a Dragon [0:00:55.01]
24. I Will Breathe a Mountain: VIII. The Bustle in a House [0:01:25.00]
25. I Will Breathe a Mountain: IX. I Saw Eternity [0:01:34.01]
26. I Will Breathe a Mountain: X. Night Practice [0:02:27.01]
27. I Will Breathe a Mountain: XI. The Fish [0:03:07.00]
28. Tillinghast Duo: I. Costa del Nowhere [0:03:06.01]
29. Tillinghast Duo: II. Table [0:02:15.00]
30. Mary [0:05:05.00]
31. The Wind in the Willows, Three Songs: I. River Song [0:01:08.01]
32. The Wind in the Willows, Three Songs: II. Messing About in Boats [0:01:45.00]
33. The Wind in the Willows, Three Songs: III. Rat's Song [0:02:19.01]
34. Dynamite Tonite: When We Built the Church [0:02:08.01]


Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

EAC extraction logfile from 12. September 2012, 23:44

William Bolcom / Songs (Farley & Bolcom)

Used drive : TSSTcorpCDDVDW SH-S223C Adapter: 2 ID: 1

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 697
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 896 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files (x86)\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -V -0 -T "COMMENT=Ripped by Tapaz9" -T "artist=%artist%" -T "title=%title%" -T "album=%albumtitle%" -T "date=%year%" -T "tracknumber=%tracknr%" -T "genre=%genre%" %source%


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-
1 | 0:00.00 | 5:23.00 | 0 | 24224
2 | 5:23.00 | 2:17.00 | 24225 | 34499
3 | 7:40.00 | 3:05.01 | 34500 | 48375
4 | 10:45.01 | 2:33.01 | 48376 | 59851
5 | 13:18.02 | 3:33.00 | 59852 | 75826
6 | 16:51.02 | 0:51.01 | 75827 | 79652
7 | 17:42.03 | 0:52.00 | 79653 | 83552
8 | 18:34.03 | 1:01.01 | 83553 | 88128
9 | 19:35.04 | 0:47.01 | 88129 | 91654
10 | 20:22.05 | 0:37.01 | 91655 | 94430
11 | 20:59.06 | 1:03.74 | 94431 | 99229
12 | 22:03.05 | 0:43.01 | 99230 | 102455
13 | 22:46.06 | 0:43.01 | 102456 | 105681
14 | 23:29.07 | 0:41.00 | 105682 | 108756
15 | 24:10.07 | 0:34.00 | 108757 | 111306
16 | 24:44.07 | 1:16.01 | 111307 | 117007
17 | 26:00.08 | 2:07.00 | 117008 | 126532
18 | 28:07.08 | 1:39.00 | 126533 | 133957
19 | 29:46.08 | 2:05.01 | 133958 | 143333
20 | 31:51.09 | 1:28.00 | 143334 | 149933
21 | 33:19.09 | 1:22.01 | 149934 | 156084
22 | 34:41.10 | 1:26.01 | 156085 | 162535
23 | 36:07.11 | 0:55.01 | 162536 | 166661
24 | 37:02.12 | 1:25.00 | 166662 | 173036
25 | 38:27.12 | 1:34.01 | 173037 | 180087
26 | 40:01.13 | 2:27.01 | 180088 | 191113
27 | 42:28.14 | 3:07.00 | 191114 | 205138
28 | 45:35.14 | 3:06.01 | 205139 | 219089
29 | 48:41.15 | 2:15.00 | 219090 | 229214
30 | 50:56.15 | 5:05.00 | 229215 | 252089
31 | 56:01.15 | 1:08.01 | 252090 | 257190
32 | 57:09.16 | 1:45.00 | 257191 | 265065
33 | 58:54.16 | 2:19.01 | 265066 | 275491
34 | 61:13.17 | 2:08.01 | 275492 | 285092


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Filename F:\Musique\Bolcom\Bolcom_Songs\William Bolcom - Songs (Farley & Bolcom).wav

Peak level 100.0 %
Extraction speed 12.3 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Copy CRC F359A3D4
Copy OK

No errors occurred

End of status report

==== Log checksum 8A3F32AD517D9932B7E6311EE400465B453B06AE5B106185CE76B334B3E92935 ====

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