Product Description
Preferred Contact Information: RMonteverdi@comcast.net
Performing Rights Organization: BMI
Website: robertgreenbergmusic.com
Facebook Band Page: facebook.com/RobertGreenbergMusic
Duration: ca. 35 minutes
Year of composition: 1992
Program Note:
I. A City By The Sea
II. Hay Mowing
III. When Grandma, May She Rest In Peace, Died
IV. Longing
V. Ancient Murderess Night
VI. Lullaby
VII. Toys
VIII. Old Age
IX. Rest
IRON BALCONIES AND LILIES was written between December 1991 and November 1992. The nine poems of the cycle, originally in Yiddish and by various poets, speak of a woman's life at various stages, from extreme old age to youth, and back to old age. The poetry is magnificent and direct: at turns quiet, passionate, gentle, ferocious, erotic, agonized and violent. In setting these poems, I have particularly sought to capture the many images and metaphors that unite them. For example, the music representing the violent, life-giving blades (scythes) of No. 2 evoke agonized, ritualized grief in No. 3, a ghastly (and comic) celebration of death in No. 5, and ultimately, a wondrous and benign angel of death in No. 9. Over the course of the cycle, the power and singular clarity of childhood memory gives way to the quiet complexity and blurred edge of adult memory.
All poems used by permission.
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