Summary: THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS Jonathan Santore composer Dan Perkins conductor New Hampshire Master Chorale Manchester Choral Society & Orchestra OVERVIEW Both the New Hampshire Master Chorale and the Manchester Choral Society elevate the works of composer-in-residence Jonathan Santore on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS, an expansive collection of works from Santore’s choral catalog. Each piece highlights the composer’s impressive command of choral writing and the ensemble’s traditions. Through their texts and other premises, several works on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS are referential pieces, some alluding to other works of vocal music while others recall the mythology of distant cultures. Requiem: Learning to Fall, a work which is both internally and externally referential, yielding a compelling, multi-layered musical text. The composition demonstrates Santore’s command of vocal texture and ability to add character to the choir’s text through instrumental accompaniments. At the heart of Requiem is the cyclical recurrence of multiple musical and textual ideas, including the ancient “dies irae” Gregorian Chant and various musical cues of Santore’s creation. The most important of these is his setting of the word “alleluia,” which opens the work and returns multiple times as a positive counterbalance to the darker, more dissonant instrumental representations of the “dies irae” chant. Requiem and Forgetting are the album’s only two pieces containing orchestral arrangements, featuring the New Hampshire-based Manchester Choral Society and Orchestra. However, several of the pieces on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS are written for both choir and additional instrumentation, including strings, piano, and soprano saxophone. While choral music is the focus of this album, Santore’s instrumental writing and orchestration for heterogeneous ensembles should not be overlooked. For example, Santore’s three-movement work O Sweet Spontaneous Earth evocatively pits the choir against a string trio as it conveys its transformative musical and textual form. In this way, O Sweet Spontaneous Earth stands alongside Requiem as the album’s most structurally nuanced and narratively cogent works. Available for purchase now at: http://www.classicalsavings.com/store/p347/There_Are_Many_Other_Legends.html TRACK LISTING Dan Perkins conductor 01 Walden Recessional New Hampshire Master Chorale Linda Galvan cello The Return (Armistice Poems) New Hampshire Master Chorale Dan Perkins piano 02 I. The Return 03 II. November 11, 1918 04 III. The Country of the Camisards 05 Kalevala Fragments New Hampshire Master Chorale Eight Gypsy Songs After Brahms New Hampshire Master Chorale 06 I. “Hey, Gypsy, strike the strings!” 07 II. “The bronzed boy” 08 III. “The moon shrouds its face” 09 IV. “Does it sometimes come to mind” 10 V. “Hark, the wind wails in the branches” 11 VI. “Dear God, you know how often” 12 VII. “High towering Rima tide” 13 VIII. “Hey, Gypsy, strike the strings!” 14 Love Always! New Hampshire Master Chorale Rik Pfenninger soprano saxophone O Sweet Spontaneous Earth New Hampshire Master Chorale Eva Gruesser violin Daniel Doña viola Leo Eguchi cello 15 I. “O sweet spontaneous” 16 II. “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” 17 III. “when God lets my body be” Requiem: Learning to Fall Manchester Choral Society and Orchestra Emily Jaworski mezzo-soprano Part One 18 I. “And now, as I prepare to fall” 19 II. “Tigers either way, before me and behind me” 20 III. “All winter beech leaves remind us of what we have lost” 21 IV. “Haul the wood, hammer the shingles” 22 V. “Cultivating wildness takes practice” 23 VI. “Seek the holy quiet of solitude” 24 VII. “In mud season” Part Two 25 VIII. “As the tree puts forth new branches” 26 IX. “On the edge of a moonlit field” 27 X. “Do not suffer change” 28 XI. “Throw clay on the(continued)
