The ending is so powerful and passionate that it makes the performance, and the album as a whole, essential listening. As early as the second line of the first setting, “The Hereafter” - “material appetites or love for the real don’t beguile me” - Muhly injects a gorgeous and evocative instrumental interlude… and The Knights orchestra, with solo violin from Colin Jacobsen, perform with maximum expression. Cavafy… Muhly comes into his own here, swept up in the emotional mystery of Cavafy’s marvelous verse. Phan and countertenor Reginald Mobley sing exquisitely, and pianist Lisa Kaplan offers passionate support, in Lorne ys my Likinge, a setting of the 19th Chester Mystery Play….Impossible Things, a “duo concerto for voice and violin,” sets a triptych of poems by the Greek poet C.P. Thanks to wonderful support from the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, whose members still appear as young and hip as they were when they burst onto the classical/new-music scene 15 years ago, Phan holds back nothing…in the last song, when the text grows tender and love is at its core, everyone comes together in extended passages of arresting beauty. “ The heart immediately opens at the sound of Phan’s voice, which conveys the opening lines of Stranger with consummate warmth and touching vulnerability. This relates the story of the three Marys – Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome – who arrive at the tomb of Christ, only to be greeted by two angels who tell them of Jesus’s resurrection.
Again drawing inspiration from Britten, this time from the English composer’s Canticle II: “Abraham and Isaac,” Muhly’s Lorne Ys My Likinge is a setting of a Chester Mystery play, a cycle of 15th-century biblical dramas.
premiere with Colin and Eric Jacobsen and The Knights at the 2016 NY Philharmonic Biennial. Cavafy, in a translation by Daniel Mendelsohn. In Impossible Things, Muhly took his text from the work of Greek poet C.P.
Phan describes his encounters with Muhly’s music as being both “ artistically and personally transformative,” and recalls the Stranger’s premiere as the first time he felt his identity had been respectfully represented in a work classical music. For Stranger, Muhly juxtaposes settings of accounts of immigration through Ellis Island with those of texts protesting the United States’ Chinese Exclusion policies of the late-19th century. This album comprises world premiere recordings of three of the composer’s major works: Impossible Things for tenor, solo violin and orchestra Lorne Ys My Likinge for countertenor, tenor and piano and Stranger for tenor and string quartet.Ī song cycle exploring the American immigrant experience, the title work was expressly written for Phan, who gave its acclaimed world premiere performance two years ago with Brooklyn Rider in January 2020 as part of his Emerging Voices project at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Nico Muhly is one of today’s most sought-after composers.
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