Product Description
Program note.
Maestro Charles Ansbacher has been a devoted supporter of my work for many years. In the past 6 years he has commissioned me to write two works for his ensemble, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra:
1) Mambo!!! (2003)
2) Pluto The Lord of the Underworld (2005)
This year, 2009, he asked me if I would be interested in writing a work for narrator and chamber orchestra like Prokofievs "Peter and the Wolf." I said, "Yes. I would be delighted to do so." He told me that the subject for this work would be Bostons own landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. "Sure," I said, "why not?" Charles told me he had a poet in mind who would provide the text, Nancy Stevenson. I said, "Great!"
The work is in four parts, following Ms. Stevensons poetic design. I wrote a marching music in Part One depicting Mr. Olmsted when as a child he walked from his home to his aunts and uncles who "lived far away." As a young man, Mr. Olmsted went through many jobs until he decided that as a landscape architect he could make cities a better place for children and adults alike. The mayor of Boston hired him to do just that, to "make Boston more livable."
In Part Two, I wrote "presto" music depicting the dredging of the Charles River and the planting of trees along its shores.
In Part Three, the text describes the Boston Emerald Necklace the paths that lead from the Fens to the Arboretum to Franklin Park. For this section I chose music that is bucolic and pastoral, a setting that evokes "the country side with a flock of sheep, complete with a shepherd and his dog." In the last section the text describes Mr. Olmsteds dream that in his parks there would be "tranquility and rest to the mind a place where the rich and the poor would play together." The music returns to the legato march that began the work.
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