This CD presents a tribute to Thea Musgrave on the occasion of her 75th birthday.  While a scholarship student of Nadia Boulanger, Scottish-born Musgrave was the winner of the Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, and has since gone on to win numerous awards and honors.  Her works have been widely performed in Britain, Europe and the USA.  Musgrave is active as a conductor of her own music, and has worked with most of the major British and American orchestras.  The New York Virtuoso Singers, arguably America's finest ‘new music' chorus, are heard in this loving tribute to Musgrave. 

 

The CD opens with a major Musgrave work–the 26 minute long "For the Time Being: Advent", based on W.H. Auden's poem "For the Time Being" (pub. 1945), a work of self-questioning in time of war and at a time of loss.  This work is a tour de force, not only for its huge variety of vocal textures, but also for the manner in which Musgrave sustains, over its entire length, the sombre intensity of Auden's vision.  British film star Michael York is the narrator on this recording.  "Black Tambourine", on six poems of Hart Crane, is performed as a continuous 18 minute span.  The cycle captures the wide range of moods of the poetry, from the madrigal-like trio of ‘Pastoral' to the tinkling salon piano of "My Grandmother's Love Letters".  The CD also includes three delightful cycles taken from the anthology "Poems on the Underground"–a series of madrigal-like works setting poems that were exhibited in the trains of the London Underground.