Christian Baldini on his composition Elapsing Twilight Shades with the Munich Radio Orchestra

Описание: To download/purchase/stream: https://naxos.lnk.to/BaldiniOrchestra...
Release Date on Centaur Records (on CD & all digital platforms): August 6, 2021

Christian Baldini (1978-)
1 Elapsing Twilight Shades (2008, rev. 2012) 7:26

Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994)
Chain 2 (1985)
Dialogue for Violin and Orchestra (17:52)
2 I Ad libitum 3:47
3 II A battuta 4:57
4 III Ad libitum 4:37
5 IV A battuta 4:31

György Ligeti (1923-2006)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1989, rev.1993) (28:57)
6 I Praeludium 4:11
7 II Aria, Hoquetus, Choral 8:00
8 III Intermezzo 2:31
9 IV Passacaglia 6:39
10 V Appassionato 7:36

Edgard Varèse (1883-1965)
11 Amériques (1918-21, rev. 1927) 23:26

TOTAL PLAYING TIME 77:41

Munich Radio Orchestra, Christian Baldini, conductor (1)
UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, Christian Baldini, conductor (2-11)
Maximilian Haft, violin (2-5)
Miranda Cuckson, violin (6-10)

Unedited Live Recordings
1 „Award Concert Weekend of the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award“ - Felsenreitschule, Salzburg Festival, April 29, 2012. (Salzburg, Austria) ORF Recording Team: Hannes Eichmann (Recording Producer), Hannes Gstrein (Recording Engineer)
2-11 Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. Recording Engineer: Stephen Bingen
1-11 Mastering Engineer: David Bowles
Photos: (c) wildbild (Munich Radio Orchestra & Christian Baldini), (c) Sam Zeng (UC Davis Symphony Orchestra & Christian Baldini), (c) J Henry Fair (Miranda Cuckson), Christian Henking (Maximilian Haft)
Cover design by Erin Low

Notes About the Program ~ by Christian Baldini

This CD production was conceived during the COVID-19 global pandemic and it is natural that it might project a certain melancholy for some memorable live performances that are close to my heart. Live music has stopped around the globe. Orchestras and opera houses are currently dark and empty, and it is thanks to recordings from years past that so many music lovers around the world manage to keep this powerful flame alive.
My previous CD recording was a studio production (not a live recording), featuring the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and soprano Elizabeth Watts in opera overtures and arias by my first love: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It feels absolutely natural to me to complement that recording with this very contrasting one, featuring unedited live recordings of a few works by composers that have been very influential to me as an artist, both as a performer and as a composer.

Elapsing Twilight Shades was composed for the Orchestre National de Lorraine (nowadays the Orchestre National de Metz) in France in 2008 and it premiered that summer by that orchestra conducted by Diego Masson at the Arsenal in Metz. The work was later selected for the American Composers Orchestra young composers scheme (Earshot) and performed (with some revisions) by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Loebel in 2009. I made some further revisions, and eventually the work was conducted by me with the Munich Radio Orchestra in Salzburg in 2012, when the jury of the Nestlé/Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award chaired by Ingo Metzmacher asked me to complete my program (which included works by Sibelius, Ligeti and Mozart) with one of my own compositions.

There are two verses from the poem "Excelsior" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which I wrote on the score, and which were an inspiration to me at that time:

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
[...]
There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell like a falling star,
Excelsior!

An important consideration that sparked the genesis of this piece is how remarkably different one same object might look like depending on the moment of the day or night in which we look at it. Similarly, different situations can be seen or understood from completely opposite points of view, depending on their context. Velocity, light, weight and texture can all vary in appearance at a glance. Elapsing Twilight Shades reflects my particular interest in creating sonic structures that behave in this manner. One idea is presented from several different perspectives. The "space" around the idea is manipulated, folded and viewed as if through a kaleidoscope, distorted by different lenses. This is the starting point for a work that eventually becomes affected by a few humorous moments and a delight in symphonic tradition. There are two main critical arrivals in the piece, where the dialogue is seemingly broken, but where in fact the previous music is expanded into a more rhapsodic and quite different dimension. For me these moments represent a very special ideal of collective beauty, achieved only through hope and freedom.