'Year's Best Album'

Kenneth Frazelle's Worldly Hopes is included on an album that tops a short list of 2011's best classical recordings: the Bridge Records release Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish In Concert. "Tellingly expressive, DeGaetani, the late mezzo-soprano, didn't perform music so much as experience it," writes reviewer Richard Scheinin in the San Jose Mercury News. "Her warm genius shines through this recording of a 1987 recital with pianist Kalish." Read on for more on the CD.


'A Spectacular Major Piece'; 'Robust and Expansive'

Reviewing Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish In Concert, Steven Ritter writes in the web magazine Audiophile Audition that Kenneth Frazelle's Worldly Hopes is "a real find, a spectacular major piece that needs to be heard by all lovers of art song." On MusicWeb International, Jonathan Woolf writes that the work is "a sensitive and successful set of five songs, robust and notably expansive in the last, long setting of Rainy Morning." See the article below for more on this wonderful Bridge Records release.


DeGaetani’s Performance of Worldly Hopes

Bridge Records has released an archival recording of mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani’s world premiere performance of Kenneth Frazelle’s Worldy Hopes. Recorded in 1987 from a live performance at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, the concert also includes works by Crumb, Strauss, Debussy and Beethoven. DeGaetani is accompanied by the esteemed pianist Gilbert Kalish, who shepherded this release. DeGaetani, who died in 1989, is well remembered both for her mastery as a vocalist and her advocacy of new music. Available at bridgerecords.com.


Bennington Music Conference

Kenneth Frazelle was composer in residence at the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East at Bennington College this summer. Frazelle's residency include the commission and premiere performance of a new work, Winter Turns, for clarinet, viola and piano, by conference participants, as well as the performance of his Piano Trio by conference faculty. See cmceast.org for more information.


Griffey Sings Frazelle in San Francisco

Anthony Dean Griffey’s concert on the prestigious San Francisco Performances series on May 4 included Kenneth Frazelle’s Songs in the Rear View Mirror. Frazelle's work was favorably reviewed at San Francisco Classical Voice. The program was a repeat of Griffey's successful recital at the Kennedy Center last May. He was accompanied by pianist Warren Jones and fiddler Paul Brown.


Wildflowers Hits YouTube

Mikael Darmanie's performance of Kenneth Frazelle's solo piano work, "Wildflowers," can be viewed on YouTube here. The video is of an April 17 performance at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, as part of the "Piano Alive: Music of Living Composers Recital." Darmanie is a 2009 graduate of UNCSA now studying at Cincinatti Conservatory with pianist Awadagin Pratt.


Major Frazelle Work at UNCSA

Kenneth Frazelle's "The Motion of Stone," for vocal soloists, chorus, and chamber orchestra, received its North Carolina premiere at UNCSA on April 9. James Allbritten conducted the UNCSA Orchestra and Cantata Singers. Frazelle's composition is based on the large-scale poem "Tombstones" by A. R. Ammons, one of America's most noted poets. Ammons was born in North Carolina and had a longstanding relationship with Wake Forest University. The poet died in 2001.

"The Motion of Stone" is in seven movements, and is a meditation on memorials and the impermanent universe. The work begins with the sound and image of chisels chipping into stone, finding names "the wind can't blow away."

One of Frazelle's most ambitious works, it received its world premiere at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1998. The piece was also commissioned by the Gardner, in fulfillment of the composer's month-long residency living at the Museum. Frazelle also worked on the project at the American Academy in Rome. A review in the Boston Globe stated "the final movement swelled to a great dance of enlightenment and bliss, causing the audience to rise in a standing ovation." The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters presented the composer with an award in 2000 and spoke of the composition as "sweeping and powerful, invoking the grandeur of the past."


Kennedy Center Honors

The Kennedy Center Honors Gala, broadcast on December 28, included Kenneth Frazelle's music from Still/Here, the acclaimed dance theater work for choreographer Bill T. Jones, who received one of the Honors. Awards were also given to Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey, with President and First Lady Obama in attendance.

Kenneth Frazelle's music for Jones was also broadcast on the CBS Early Morning Show the same week.

Frazelle's score for Still/Here was written in 1994 for the folksinger Odetta. The controversial piece toured the world for two years, and was seen by several million viewers. The work was also the subject of a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers.

SONGS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR

Kenneth Frazelle's latest composition, SONGS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR, for voice and piano, will receive two very different performances in the spring of 2010. On May 5, acclaimed tenor Anthony Dean Griffey performs the song cycle, with pianist Warren Jones, in a Vocal Arts Society recital at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. And on March 26, folksinger Laurelyn Dossett performs with the composer on piano at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, NC.

Part road trip and part childhood reminiscence, SONGS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR is an evocative and haunting musical portrait of Southern life and art. The work grew out of a fascination with the artistic progeny of humble Hale County, Alabama. That ragged land was home to the depression-era sharecroppers depicted by James Agee and Walker Evans in their classic book of prose and photographs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." And beginning in the 1960s, Hale County’s decaying architecture and shifting landscape were captured in the celebrated photographs, sculpture and paintings of Alabama native William Christenberry. When Frazelle undertook his own journey in the artists’ footsteps he not only found new sources of inspiration but unexpectedly unearthed many poignant, nostalgic and often turbulent memories from his own Southern childhood.

With Frazelle’s unique synthesis of folk song and art song, SONGS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR takes listeners on a journey past abandoned barns, tangles of kudzu and evangelizing road signs. We enter the bleak farmhouses of the poor, and we peer into the troubled home of a sensitive young boy. The work’s ten songs are united by refreshing harmonies, coloristic piano writing, and the undulating rhythm of the highway.

SONGS IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR is one of Kenneth Frazelle’s most ambitious works. His previous compositions for voice have reached international audiences through performances by Dawn Upshaw, Odetta, Jan DeGaetani and Cassandra Wilson.

Grammy winner Anthony Dean Griffey won rave reviews for his portrayal of the title role in Britten's Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008. He sang the role of Mitch in the world premiere of Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire with the San Francisco Opera. Along with his frequent operatic roles, he is a regular guest with the world's leading orchestras.

As a performer with her popular band Polecat Creek, Laurelyn Dossett has recorded three albums, toured extensively, and appeared on A Prairie Home Companion. She has been a soloist with the North Carolina Symphony. Her own songs have been recorded by such esteemed musicians as Levon Helm.

Praise for BLUE RIDGE AIRS II on Paula Live!

Kenneth Frazelle's Blue Ridge Airs II is the standout track on this album. The structure is sometimes predictable, but the writing is always intelligent. It's hard to write a folk music-related piece that quotes hymn tunes and uses mild dissonance and open fifths without sounding like Copland or Ives, but Frazelle keeps it from being merely derivative. Some extended technique creates bird-call effect at one point, and he does not over-use it. He connects the hazier sections with the busier exceptionally well, and nothing sounds forced or contrived. The score calls for some playing inside the piano that imitates a hammered dulcimer. Airs II is one of the best mixes of classical disciplines, useful dissonances, and an Americana atmosphere that I've ever heard. Everything it thought out and necessary. If the rest of Frazelle's music is as good as this more people need to hear it.
--AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE

Blue Ridge Airs II , by Kenneth Frazelle, is probably the most spectacular...in terms of excitement and effect. With quotes from different sources, it explores the flute's ability to create explosive virtuostic passages, and is the kind of piece that will make the audience cheer wildly at the end of the recital.
--FANFARE