Chameleon Arts Ensemble – To Wake the Dead: Tchaikovsky, Howells, Albert, Vierne

Louis Vierne’s epic, late-Romantic Piano Quintet (1917) is a powerful and emotionally charged work conceived as a votive offering for his son who was killed in action. With his Rhapsodic Quintet for clarinet and strings, Herbert Howells too, contemplates an England, and a way of life, destroyed by the First World War. Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d'un lieu cher for violin and piano is a misty reflections of a dear place. Finally, Stephen Albert adapts James Joyce’s nearly incomprehensible text – with its wordplay, dreamlike ambiguity, and half-remembered fragments – into a moving set of sentimental songs for soprano and chamber ensemble exploring love, loss, and the cyclical nature of life itself.

https://chameleonarts.org/concerts/to-wake-the-dead/