Composer: Virko Baley
Performer: Lucy Shelton, Karen Bentley Pollick, Timothy Hoft
Orchestra: Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Conductor: Virko Baley
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Toccata Classics
Catalogue: TOCC0681
Release: 2023
Size: 730 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Uniforms of Snow
01. No. 1, Intrada – Song Without Words
02. No. 2, Love Can Do All but Raise the Dead
03. No. 3, Oh Honey of an Hour
04. No. 4, I Held a Jewel in My Fingers
05. No. 5, Interlude I
06. No. 6, There Is a Solitude of Space
07. No. 7, Out of Sight? What of That?
08. No. 8, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
09. No. 9, There Is a Pain, So Utter
10. No. 10, Interlude II “Tren”
11. No. 11, Epilogue “Little Cousins”
10 Songs Without Words
12. No. 1, Love Can Do All but Raise the Dead
13. No. 2, Oh, Honey of an Hour
14. No. 3, There Is a Solitude of Space
15. No. 4, L’allegro
16. No. 5, There Is a Languor
17. No. 6, Out of Sight? What of That?
18. No. 7, Der Abschied
19. No. 8, It Struck Me Every Day
20. No. 9, There Is a Pain – So Utter
21. No. 10, A Poem of Aleks
Virko Baley was born in Ukraine in 1938 and came to the USA as a refugee in 1949, eventually making his home in Las Vegas. He has long been fascinated by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, as can be heard in the two moving works recorded here – one an orchestral song-cycle setting her texts, the other a suite for violin and piano inspired by those settings. They display an acute ear for orchestral colour, a fondness for dramatic gesture and a strong sense of lyricism, occasionally inflected by distant echoes of Baley’s eastern European origins, the richness of the song-cycle placing him downstream from Mahler and Berg and the restraint of the Songs without Words occasionally evoking Arvo Pärt.