“Three Partings” special performance at Lord Byron Festival

“Three Part­ings” — my song cycle of three three set­tings of Lord Byron poetry–received a spe­cial per­for­mance on April 12, 2014.

This was not a stan­dard con­cert con­cert of music; the music was pre­sented as part of a three-day aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ence, “Col­lect­ing Byron: A Con­fer­ence in Cel­e­bra­tion of the Byron Soci­ety Col­lec­tion.” The col­lec­tion is housed at Drew University.

My piece was per­formed in the set­ting of a lec­ture, “Musi­cal Byron.” The lec­turer was my col­league Robert Butts, who spoke on aspects of Roman­ti­cism that are shared in the dis­ci­plines of music and poetry. Exam­ples were cited from from Roman­tic giants such as Beethoven and Verdi, along with, of course, Lord Byron. Musi­cal exam­ples were per­formed live, employ­ing pieces from the age of Byron on through to a slightly later age (Verdi). My piece rep­re­sented a mod­ern take on “Musi­cal Byron.”

The venue was Mead Hall at Drew Uni­ver­sity in Madi­son, NJ. The superb per­form­ers were Emily Clare Thomp­son, soprano; Stanichka Dim­itrova, vio­lin; Nancy Con­nell, cello; Andy Cap, piano. I should sin­gle out the singer, Emily, a spe­cial­ist in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture. It was her encour­age­ment that led me to write this song cycle in the first place!

Here are a few pic­tures. Click for a larger view.

Mead Hall, Drew University

“Musi­cal Byron” program

Emily Clare Thomp­son with the ensemble