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)

Alexander String Quartet