With Strings Attached

Alexander String Quartet
San Francisco Choral Artists

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This recording grew out of a joint venture by two of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most adventurous ensembles, San Francisco Choral Artists and the Alexander String Quartet, and specifically out of a sequence of concerts they gave together in the Bay Area in May 2011 in celebration of the Choral Artists’ 25th Anniversary Season. It was a unique collaboration, and it produced a unique sound: a 24-voice chamber choir partnered with a string quartet in both established works by classical composers and new works commissioned specifically for these artists. This recording offers listeners the opportunity to experience that collaboration and some of the possibilities it unlocks. 

The most striking aspect of this project may well be the dizzying variety of the texts set
here, some of them written very recently. While Veronika Krausas pays tribute to San Francisco in language of the birds, on texts of the city’s famous poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Stephen Leek’s Hollow Stone draws on Australian Randolph Stow’s poem of exterior and interior space, not all of the texts are by modern poets. Michael Gandolfi’s Winter Light sets two evocative poems of Amy Lowell, while Paul Chihara draws on the sumptuous poetry of Paul Verlaine in his lush setting of that poet’s famous night-song, Clair de Lune. And we recall unfamiliar music by great composers of the past in Beethoven’s touching memorial for a woman who died in childbirth, in Brahms’ intimate settings of four quite different poets, and in transcriptions for string quartet of two of Brahms’ pieces for piano.

Part of the pleasure of this project is the astonishing variety of texts and music that the
celebratory collaboration produced. Perhaps even more surprising is the resonance inherent in this partnership of strings and voices — of voices “with strings attached.”

With Strings Attached

Music: Samples from "language of the birds"
Composer: Veronika Krausas
Artists: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet & narrator; Alexander String Quartet; San Francisco Choral Artists
Album: With Strings Attached
Label: Foghorn Classics

Purchase With Strings Attached via:
Allegro Classical - http://bit.ly/GGzRdn
Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/GFboqb

Ever since its installation in 2008, Veronika Krausas has been taken by language of the birds, a spectacular outdoor work created by Brian Goggin with Dorka Keehn. The sculpture is located in North Beach, in front of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. In response to this site-specific piece, Krausas chose to set her work to Ferlingheti’s San Francisco Poems.

“From all the texts Brian used in his sculpture I was struck by Ferlinghetti’s. His words help you see the wonder of life, not only in nature, but also in the quirkiness of the people around us. They make you stand on your head, look at things from a different perspective.” — Veronika Krausas

Her pieces, which she describes as “light-hearted, resembling the music of Erik Satie,” combine a phenomenally rich variety in the music. The three light-hearted “bird pieces” are set off by two introspective, slower pieces that evoke the stillness of fog drifting into San Francisco and “trees dreaming thru all time.” And as a special treat, the poetry is read by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself.


With Strings Attached: "language of the birds" sample pack

Music: Excerpts from "Winter Light"
Composer: Michael Gandolfi
Artists: Alexander String Quartet and the San Francisco Choral Artists
Album: With Strings Attached
Label: Foghorn Classics

Purchase With Strings Attached via:
Allegro Classical - http://bit.ly/GGzRdn
Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/GFboqb


Recently featured on WNYC’s “New Sounds”, Michael Gandolfi’s Winter Light shows why this new composer is quickly becoming a star in more than just contemporary concert music. It is also another piece on the album inspired by poetry. The work consists of two movements, “Falling Snow” and “Opal,” which both come from American poet Amy Lowell’s collection Pictures of the Floating World.

The poetry in “Falling Snow” depicts an unadorned human experience, and through it, an elegiac acknowledgment of life’s transitory nature. “Opal”features an emotional and erotic relationship between to women, and the woman to whom “Opal” is addressed was actress Ada Dwyer Russell whom Lowell met in Boston in 1909. It acknowledges and embraces love’s potential for both fulfillment and frustration in its extraordinary apposition of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, in the same moment.

For more on composer Michael Gandolfi, please visit www.michaelgandolfi.com


With Strings Attached: "Winter Light" (excerpts of both movements)

Music: Excerpts from "Clair de Lune" 
Composer: Paul Chihara 
Artists: Alexander String Quartet and the San Francisco Choral Artists 
Album: With Strings Attached 
Label: Foghorn Classics

Purchase With Strings Attached via: 
Allegro Classical - http://bit.ly/GGzRdn 
Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/GFboqb

“When I think about San Francisco I think about ballet, and since Verlaine’s ‘Clair de Lune’ (Moonlight) poem is about dancing, it was inevitable I would pick this.” Paul Chihara, a former composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Ballet, has had a unique connection with French Impressionism ever since he was a student and discovered the music of Ravel, Poulenc, and Debussy through his teacher Nadia Boulanger. So for this special commission, it was only fitting to refer to Debussy’s most popular composition — Clair de Lune. “But,” stresses Chihara, “it is more about Verlaine’s poem than about Debussy’s music, more about dancing in the moonlight than about the moon itself.”

With Strings Attached: "Clair de Lune" (excerpts)

Music: Excerpt from "Intermezzo in A Major" 
Composer: Johannes Brahms, transcribe by Zakarias Grafilo 
Artists: Alexander String Quartet 
Album: With Strings Attached 
Label: Foghorn Classics

Purchase With Strings Attached via: 
Allegro Classical - http://bit.ly/GGzRdn 
Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/GFboqb

The Intermezzo in A Major is the second of Brahms’ Six Piano Pieces, Opus 118, which
he composed in 1892–93, only a few years before his death. Brahms’ performance marking for this music is Andante teneramente (“tenderly”), and that gentle mood prevails throughout, though the center section is elaborate and varied before the subtle reintroduction of the opening material.
