Beauty Intolerable - Songs of Sheila Silver Various Artists / Sheila Silver

• Sheila Silver (b. 1946): Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay:
• 1Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: I. First Fig01:05
• 2Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: II. I, being born a woman02:01
• 3Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: III. Recuerdo04:15
• 4Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: IV. Hyacinth04:17
• 5Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: V. Only until this cigarette is ended04:16
• 6Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: VI. The Penitent03:45
• 7Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: VII. She is Overheard Singing04:16
• 8Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: VIII. Thursday02:03
• 9Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: IX. Tristan08:58
• 10Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: X. An Ancient Gesture05:00
• 11Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XI. Aubade09:53
• 12Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XII. A Visit to the Asylum02:45
• 13Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XIII. Mindful of you04:56
• 14Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XIV. What lips my lips have kissed04:46
• 15Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XV. Love, though for this04:12
• 16Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay: XVI. First Fig (I)00:59
• On Loving:
• 17On Loving: I. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!03:47
• 18On Loving: II. Mindful of you05:12
• 19On Loving: III. Love is a Magic Ray04:39
• Transcending:
• 20Transcending: I. The Cat and the Moon04:30
• 21Transcending: II. To be calm, to be serene04:09
• 22Transcending: III. We wear the Mask02:28
• Nocturne for piano solo:
• 23Nocturne for piano solo11:49
• Chariessa:
• 24Chariessa: I. Leave Crete and come to us06:20
• 25Chariessa: II. Lament for a Maidenhead01:49
• 26Chariessa: III. The full moon is shining02:53
• 27Chariessa: IV. Gold is God's child02:19
• 28Chariessa: V. The moon and then the Pleiades go down05:21
• 29Chariessa: VI. As a whirlwind swoops on an oak02:04
• Four Songs from the Beauty Intolerable Songbook:
• 30Four Songs from the Beauty Intolerable Songbook: I. I, being born a woman02:03
• 31Four Songs from the Beauty Intolerable Songbook: II. She is Overheard Singing04:18
• 32Four Songs from the Beauty Intolerable Songbook: III. An Ancient Gesture05:11
• 33Four Songs from the Beauty Intolerable Songbook: IV. Love, though for this03:54
• Total Runtime02:20:13

Info for Beauty Intolerable - Songs of Sheila Silver

Sheila Silver has written in a wide range of mediums, from solo instrumental to large orchestral works, from opera to feature film scores. She is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions, including an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award, the Rome Prize, and the Prix de Paris, among many others. She is Professor Emeritas of Music at Stony Brook University. This recording features song cycles including Beauty Intolerable, based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a cycle using fragments of texts from Sappho, along with a nocturne for solo piano. The stellar cast of performers includes Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, Ryan McCullough, Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, Sidney Outlaw, Warren Jones, Deanne Meek, Christopher Cooley, Risa Renae Harman, and Timothy Long.

"…Silver has written other song cycles, though nothing as extensive and complex as her Millay songbook. This new two-CD set takes a long look at Silver’s work, and includes “On Loving,” written in 2011, in memory of Diane Kalish (which includes another setting of a Millay poem); “Transcending,” written in 1995, in memory of Michael Dash; and “Chariessa,” a group of settings from fragments of poetry by Sappho, which dates from 1977-78. Millay also was inspired by Sappho, who appears in some of her poetry. All things work in harmony, cacophony, and melody here. The CD set also includes a short suite of four songs drawn from “Beauty Intolerable,” arranged for contralto Stephanie Blythe… And, just to keep things interesting, there is a solo piano work, “Nocturne,” commissioned for Gilbert Kalish’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and premiered by him in 2015. He plays it brilliantly on this CD set.…It is very interesting to hear the progress of the composer’s style from the mid-1970s to today. What changes most is the complexity of settings, from the radically progressive of the past to the overwhelmingly discordant of the present. Her musical work is consistent; however, she brings more underscoring into the recent work and the final impact of the poems she has chosen to work with is often lessened through the layered musicality she employs. When I listen to “Beauty Intolerable,” I am swept into foreign worlds that alter with each hearing. For pure rendering of texts, I prefer “Transcending,” which uses the poetry of W.B. Yeats, H.D. Thoreau, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Also, the baritone voice of Sidney Outlaw brings both a gravity and a graveness to these songs which clearly make them resound in memory. In much the same way, Stephanie Blythe’s deeper tones make her quartet of songs from the principal work cleaner and clearer than the soprano renderings in the full work. Both of these short song-groups should receive many performances. Upshaw’s work in “On Loving,” with texts by Millay, Shakespeare, and Kahlil Gibran, is superb. She sings these songs with a joyous ring that makes even the most solemn lyric pay off beautifully: “For I never saw true beauty till this night.” This collection of songs from an inspired composer will often grace my player. It will take many hearings to set them all in my mind and memory…" (Berkshire Edge)

Dawn Upshaw, soprano
Gilbert Kalish, piano
Sidney Outlaw, baritone
Warren Jones, piano
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano
Ryan McCullough, piano
Stephanie Blythe, contralto
Kayo Iwama, piano

Sheila Silver
is an important and vital voice in American music today. She has written in a wide range of mediums: from solo instrumental works to large orchestral works; from opera to feature film scores. Her musical language is a unique synthesis of the tonal and atonal worlds, coupled with a rhythmic complexity which is both masterful and compelling. Again and again, audiences and critics praise her music as powerful and emotionally charged, accessible, and masterfully conceived. “Only a few composers in any generation enliven the art form with their musical language and herald new directions in music. Sheila Silver is such a visionary.” (Wetterauer Zeitung, Germany, 2004)

Born in Seattle, Washington in 1946, Silver began piano studies at the age of five. Ms. Silver earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 where she began composition studies with Edwin Dugger. Upon graduation she was awarded the coveted George Ladd Prix de Paris for two years study in Europe where she worked with Erhard Karkoschka in Stuttgart and Gyorgy Ligeti in Berlin and Hamburg. She earned her doctorate from Brandeis University where she studied with Arthur Berger, Harold Shapero, and Seymour Shifrin. Her studies also included an Abraham Sachar Traveling Grant which enabled her to spend 18 months in London and a Koussevitzky Fellowship for a summer at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood where she studied with Jacob Druckman.

Sheila Silver’s compositions have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the United States and Europe including: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the RAI Orchestra of Rome, the American Composers Orchestra, the Lithuanian State Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Stockton Symphony, the Chicago String Ensemble, the Richmond Symphony, the Illinois Symphony, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Hartford Chamber Orchestra, Alexander Paley, Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, Timothy Eddy, the Guild Trio, Heidi Lehwalder and the Muir Quartet, the Ying Quartet, and Tapestry Vocal Ensemble.

Sheila recently completed an opera based on Khaled Hosseini’s international best-selling novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which takes place in contemporary Afghanistan. Commissioned by the Seattle Opera, it will be premiered in October 2022. She recently returned from her fourth trip to India where she studies Hindustani music with Pandit Kedar Narayan Bodas. Silver incorporated an authentic Hindustani color into her score for the opera. Recent honors for the opera include: a 2014 Opera America Discovery Grant for Female Composers, funded by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation; selection in Opera America’s 2016 New Works Forum and New Works Showcase concert; a 2015 NEA Opera Development grant through American Opera Projects; a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2016 NYSCA Commission Award.

Other honors include: the 2007 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Music Composition in Opera, for her opera, The Wooden Sword; Bunting Institute Fellowship; the Rome Prize; the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Composer Award; twice winner of the ISCM National Composers Competition; and awards and commissions from the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Residency), the Camargo Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, New York State Council of the Arts, the Barlow Foundation, the Paul Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cary Trust.

In 2018 she received a Paul Fromm Commission for Being in Life, a concerto for Ann Ellsworth, Alphorn/French horn – with string orchestra and 5 Tibetan singing bowls, featuring the concert master at soloist. It was premiered by Seattle’s Philharmonia Northwest, Julia Tai, conductor, in October 2019 and will be performed in Rome by the Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble, in 2020-2021 season (Corona-virus permitting).

Silver was the Elliot Carter Resident Composer at the American Academy in Rome in Spring 2020, where she worked on a new piece, If Trees Could Talk, for 4 female singers, piano, Tibetan bowls, and video. Songfest 2021 (originally scheduled for 2020) will premiere this new work in an entire evening devoted to Sheila’s vocal music including the complete Beauty Intolerable, A Songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Premiered in 2013, the Songbook contains 14 songs and was recently recorded with singers Dawn Upshaw, Stephanie Blythe, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Deanne Meek, and Risa Renae Harman. It will be released in early 2021 on a 2 disc CD set with all of Silver’s song repertoire from 1979-2018.

Other recordings, both on the Naxos label, include her Piano Concerto and Six Preludes for Piano on poems of Baudelaire, with Alexander Paley, piano, and the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, Gintaras Rinkevicius, conductor; and her Shirat Sara (Song of Sarah) with Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Strings; and Twilight’s Last Gleaming, for two pianos and percussion on the Bridge Label.

Silver composed the sound track to Who the Hell is Bobby Roos? – a feature film which was awarded the New American Cinema Award at the Seattle International Film Festival, 2002 and is currently available on DVD. She created the score for Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis rocked the boat and started a scientific revolution, released in 2018 and being screened internationally. A new film score for the documentary Regenerating Life, Hope for a destructive species, is in the works.

Sheila Silver lives in Spencertown, New York, with her husband, film writer and director, John Feldman. Their son, Victor Feldman, is a senior at Brandeis University. Silver is Professor Emeritas of Music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her music is published by Lauren Keiser Music, Studio 4 Productions, and Argenta Music, and is recorded on various labels.

This album contains no booklet.