The immortal melodies of Mozart share the stage with the modern musical musings of Gabriel Kahane in tonight’s concert broadcast on Classical KING FM.
Tune in to KING FM online or at 98.1 tonight at 9pm to hear Northwest Sinfonietta perform Mozart’s ethereal Requiem in D Minor alongside Gabriel Kahane’s sprawling Crane Palimpsest, with the singer-songwriter himself center stage. Both performances are conducted by Eric Jacobsen.
Kahane’s eclectic musical language merges with the modernist poetry of Hart Crane in this grooving, musing, pop-meets-classical meditation on New York City.
In the composer’s own words:
Crane Palimpsest is a love letter to New York, in the form of a meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, juxtaposing settings of stanzas from Hart Crane’s Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge with songs set to my own lyrics in response to Crane’s poem. I’ve literalized the idea of “the bridge” in the sense that two distinct musical vocabularies are in play and cross paths; the first being the more formal language heard in the introduction and first several stanzas of the Crane, the second being the vernacular or pop-based harmonic language in the songs with my own words.
As the piece reaches a kind of peripeteia around the line “O Harp and Altar”, it is as if the two languages, crudely speaking, meet on the bridge and are exchanged: the final song with my own lyrics begins in a dense and dissonant setting before giving way to the final stanzas of the Crane poem which are set in an unapologetically open harmonic atmosphere.
Want a sneak preview? Check out our in-studio video of Gabriel Kahane performing his Los Angeles-inspired piece “Bradbury (304 Broadway)” with Brooklyn Rider: