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A Portrait of Augusta Read Thomas

Tony Arnold (soprano) & Jennifer Hoult (harp), Fred Hemke (alto saxophone), Katie Hyun (violin) & Mihai Marica (cello)

New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Elm City Girls' Choir, The New York Virtuoso Singers, William Boughton, Rebecca Rosenbaum, Harold Rosenbaum

Release Date: 2nd Jun 2014
Catalogue No: NI6262
Label: Nimbus
Series: Alliance, Recordings of Works by Augusta Read Thomas
Length: 71 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Thomas, Augusta: Two E.E. Cummings Songs

Work length9:15

$2.00

$2.80

The Elm City Girls’ Choir
William Boughton

I. Sky candy spouting violets

Track length3:58

$1.00

$1.40

II. (kiss me)

Track length5:17

$1.00

$1.40

Thomas, Augusta: Hemke Concerto "Prisms Of Light"

Work length20:49

$4.50

$6.30

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

I. Illuminations

Track length6:50

$1.00

$1.40

II. Sunrise Ballad

Track length7:02

$1.50

$2.10

III. Chasing Radiance

Track length2:51

$1.00

$1.40

IV. Solar Rings

Track length4:06

$1.00

$1.40

Thomas, Augusta: Prayer and Celebration

Work length4:05

$1.00

$1.40

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

Thomas, Augusta: Absolute Ocean

Work length20:40

$4.00

$5.60

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

I. the moon is hiding in her hair

Track length5:50

$1.00

$1.40

II. who knows if the moon's a balloon

Track length4:57

$1.00

$1.40

interlude

Track length3:42

$1.00

$1.40

III. open your heart

Track length6:11

$1.00

$1.40

Thomas, Augusta: Silent Moon

Work length7:26

$3.00

$4.20

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

I. Still: Souldul and Resonant

Track length2:05

$1.00

$1.40

II. Energetic: Majestic and Dramatic

Track length2:08

$1.00

$1.40

III. Suspended: Lyrical and Chant-like

Track length3:13

$1.00

$1.40

Thomas, Augusta: Of Paradise and Light

Work length5:55

$1.00

$1.40

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

Thomas, Augusta: Spells

Work length3:33

$1.00

$1.40

New Haven Symphony Orchestra
William Boughton

About
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About

Bold, passionate, urgent—Augusta Read Thomas writes music that is wholly and completely alive. In many of her own program notes, she includes this sentence: “I like music that is alive and jumps off the page and out of the instrument as if something big is at stake.” The first two volumes of this Augusta Read Thomas recording series focused on orchestral and chamber/piano music respectively, collecting performances by various ensembles. This third volume is something a bit different: a recording of a live 50th birthday concert presented by the New Haven (Connecticut) Symphony Orchestra under the direction of William Boughton. One of the two largescale works on the recording is also one of Thomas’s most recent (and was premiered on the concert), the dramatic Hemke Concerto, “Prisms of Light” (2014). This concerto was commissioned as a retirement gift for legendary saxophonist and pedagogue Frederick L. Hemke by many of his students past and present. This concerto is music that almost requires the listener to wear sunglasses—exploring fully the saxophone’s capacity for both lyrical, human expression and glorious, otherworldly color. The other large-scale composition is Absolute Ocean (2008), a song-cycle for soprano and orchestra with a significant obbligato harp part. Absolute Ocean is especially spare and atmospheric in texture. The ringing, resonant pluck of the harp is clearly the dominant musical image, inspiring the orchestral texture that surrounds it.

Despite using a medium size symphony scoring, the instruments are never all heard together—the result gives an audible sense of the orchestra as one large, graceful extension of the harp.

A Portrait of Augusta Read Thomas

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