Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem is art song’s most important American composer; he also writes in many other genres including operas, symphonies, piano concertos, choral works, chamber music and music for the ballet. Mr. Rorem’s many books demonstrate his literary talent; the most recent, Other Entertainment, is a collection of essays and reminiscences.

Mr. Rorem wrote the "required" song for the Lotte Lehmann Foundation's CyberSing 2002. One may download the song from the Boosey & Hawkes website: www.boosey.com

From the New York Times of 9 May 2002:

Ned Rorem Limns the World of Loss
By ANNE MIDGETTE

Another Sleep," Ned Rorem's new song cycle, is a memorial for Jim Holmes, Mr. Rorem's companion of more than 30 years, who died in 1999. It's so open and so personal that on one level all you can do is embrace it and be moved by it. It consists of 19 songs with lyrics by a range of poets, "sewn together," in Mr. Rorem's words, and includes three songs the composer wrote in the late 1940's. The poetry is various, but the message, in this context, is unambiguous: the themes are loss and death and the gray emptiness of surviving alone.

The cycle was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which gave its premiere on Sunday afternoon, oddly flanked by two Mozart pieces for wind octet (backed up by Edgar Meyer on double bass), both of which inhabited a very different world from Mr. Rorem's.

That world is a quietly literate one, in which the integrity of words is never violated but the piano line is as articulate and specific as the vocal one. This isn't a subject that admits of quiet detachment, and it brought Mr. Rorem to a kind of naked openness: jagged angry syncopations in "The Man With Night Sweats" (to a poem by Thom Gunn); or splintered chords in the first song, from Milton's "Paradise Lost." ("Oh Hell! What do mine eyes with grief behold!")

Some of the more memorable songs, however, were more oblique: "The Bed," a cool tableau of lovers in bed that's also a duet between piano and a cappella voice (although the music caught little of the poem's sexuality), or "The Barbarians," a wonderful poem by Cavafy, which started with the ominous threat of a single line in the piano's lower reaches and ended stranded at the treble end, off the keys.

It was in fact the piano (expressively played by Simon Dunn) that set out and sustained each song's compass, all the more so in this performance because of the weaknesses of the singer. Kurt Ollmann had the unenviable task of stepping in to replace Simon Keenleyside and learning the whole thing on some three weeks' notice. He sang with feeling, but his voice was dry and unable to blossom fully in the songs' climaxes.

Although it has a large-scale topic, "Another Sleep" is not a large-scale work. Its force, and its point, might have carried better over slightly fewer of these lovely songs.