Farleybolcom - Bolcomsongs [CD]

William Bolcom (b. 1938)SongsThis selection by Carole Farley of my songs coversforty years of my writing for both concert and theater.Not everyone can shift stylistic gears as easily andbrilliantly as she from straight-out Broadway parody(Casino Paradise's Night, Make My Day) to difficult artmusic (the I Will Breathe a Mountain cycle). Who but acourageous soprano would start a recording with ascream? Carole has begun her programme with YouCannot Have Me Now, from the 1969 opera for actorsGreatshot, written for the Yale Repertory Theater in1969; the character is a German war-bride in a marriedofficers'neighbourhood on a military base, telling us ofher and her husband's wild goings-on among the brassand NCOs. A friend at Stanford met such a womanliving at a California airbase, and Arnold Weinstein'slyric stretches her story only slightly; the part about aten-year duration is evidently true to life. Night, MakeMy Day, from the 1990 theatre opera Casino Paradise,is sung torchily by the young repressed spinster Cisanticipating a wedding night that, at the last minute, issnatched from her. Weinstein and I intended it as a sendupof a Liza Minnelli-ish over-the-top extravaganza, butthe cabaret performer Karen Akers has performed itstraight, to our amazement. Cis will reappear, telling uswhy her love life is so lonely, in My Father theGangster.When Marilyn Horne gave her farewell concert afew years ago (of concert and opera repertoire only; shestill performs popular music wonderfully), she asked fora contribution. May Swenson's The Digital WonderWatch was the result; the poem celebrates hercompanion's recent acquisition of a phenomenal multiusetimepiece.My long-time friend and frequent collaborator theconductor Dennis Russell Davies began a project withthe rock diva Marianne Faithfull involving mycollaboration with the poet-playwright FrankMcGuinness - of which this terrifying poem, The LastDays of Mankind, was the only song achieved.Dan Wagoner is one of my favourite New Yorkdancers; imagine William Blake's spirit-portrait GladDay come to life. His dancing has sometimes broughttears. Wagoner's companion George Montgomery, aspare, laconic poet of last century's postwar New YorkSchool, is, I am told, better known in Spanish translationthan in English; Songs to Dance is a trio for singer,dancer, and piano that Dan, my wife Joan Morris, and Iperformed - only once - at New York's Joyce Theater.When Marilyn Horne asked for a cycle of songsfrom American women poets, she had already pickedEmily Dickinson's The Bustle in the House, whichMarilyn had read at her brother's funeral. I in turn askedmy friend Alice Fulton to pick an anthology for me,including one of her own poems; I felt her choiceswould lend I Will Breathe a Mountain a special verbaltopography - something I had also requested from thepoet T. J. Anderson III for the choral cycle The Mask.The wide poetic range incorporates Edna St. VincentMillay (in sonnet form), Fulton (in an evocation of herearly woma