In case you missed it, you can check out Peter Burwasser’s 6/2/09 review of the VESPERS recording on the Philadelphia City Paper’s site:

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2009/06/04/new-made-old

(thanks to @supermaren for the link!!)

There’s a fantastic review for the new Vespers disc up on Audiophile Audition.

Seldom do I come across a piece with such profoundly direct emotional appeal. I’ll say it outright: this work is a masterpiece of the deepest kind… This is easily one of the best releases of the year of any type, and it would be a crime to pass it up.

More praise for VESPERS, from “The Recovering Choir Director”.

Unlike so much that sounds experimental, Smith is a composer who has found his voice:  Here is a man that teaches with authority.  Behind his work stands not only a well-trained pen, but also but also the excellent Lutheran musical tradition.  All of this comes together in Smith’s Vespers, first performed in 2008 by The Crossing and Piffaro.   This work combines old and new and embraces originality without eschewing lovability.

Read more here.

Don’t miss the last concert of

Piffaro’s 2008-2009 season!

Harmony of the Spheres, with special guest Ellen Hargis, soprano.

soprano, Ellen Hargis

Friday, 5/8/09, 8:00 p.m.
St. Mark’s Church
1625 Locust St., Philadelphia

Saturday, 5/9/09, 8:00 p.m.
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia
(with special after-party celebrating the release of our Piffaro’s newest CD)

Sunday, 5/10/09, 4:00 p.m.
Sts. Andrew and Matthew Church
8th & Shipley St., Wilmington, DE

Vespers

Join members of Piffaro, the Crossing Choir, conductor Donald Nally, and composer Kile Smith after Piffaro’s concert on Saturday, May 9, 2009 for a VESPERS CD RELEASE PARTY. The concert is at 8:00 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, 8855 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia (Our Harmony of the Spheres concert… Get Tickets Here!).

We will be gathering in Widener Hall after the concert on Saturday night to celebrate the CD Release with a champagne toast and light refreshments. Piffaro will have the CD for sale there, and the musicians will be on hand to sign your copy.

The recording was just released on the Navona label, and is available for download there. Or buy the CD directly from Piffaro at the concert, or online here.

Read more about the recording and the process on Kile Smith’s site here.

And check out the recording’s first review from The Buffalo News:

Kile Smith, Vespers performed by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band and The Crossing Chorus (Navona). What a beautiful and remarkable thing this turns out to be. Here on a new label, is newly composed music in the spirit of the Renaissance and “the musical flowering of the Lutheran Reformation” that seems to combine both the most sumptuous beauty of Church music with the charm and delight of court music. It’s altogether gorgeous and haunting. And when, out of some necessity of text and some version of harmonic calamity, a sudden dissonance arrives that out-Gesualdos Gesualdo, you remember that Kile Smith is a 21st century composer living in Philadelphia who has, almost like some Borgesian Pierre Menard (who wrote “Don Quixote” out of his own modern needs), synthesized all of this anew out of what has gone before. It would appear that we now have a piece of contemporary music that, in its very different way, deserves to be mentioned along with Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.” The performance here is stunning. ★★★★( J. S.) (Click here for full article)

Here is an article on a subject related to our Harmony of the Spheres program that you might be interested in reading.

Music, Sculpture, and Everything Else in the World

An Essay by Alvin Holm AIA, 2009

Alvin Holm

Vitruvius, writing for his patron Caesar Augustus, set forth the necessity for an architect to have knowledge of music. Had he been writing about sculptors or painters he would certainly have required the same understanding of music for them. Two thousand years of scholarship have pondered this attractive but puzzling idea, and it is likely to remain elusive for some time to come. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries architects like Palladio worried about why “what pleases the ear pleases the eye”, and today we seem further than ever from an answer. Pythagoras, however, may have provided the clue.

The majestic notion that the entire cosmos is intrinsically harmonic is credited to Pythagoras whose Read more »

The incomparable soprano Ellen Hargis to join Piffaro for its May program, “Harmony of the Spheres”

soprano, Ellen Hargis

Piffaro audiences have heard Ellen in our 2001 and 2004 programs with The King’s Noyse.  We are delighted that she returns to enchant us all, audience members and performers alike, with her beautiful voice and gracious stage presence.

Ellen Hargis is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of 17th and 18th century music. Called “the baroque music diva” by New Yorker magazine, she is a frequent collaborator with such leading ensembles as The King’s Noyse, The Newberry Consort, Tragicomedia, Piffaro, Theatre of Voices, the Mozartean Players, Fretwork and Andrew Lawrence-King and the Harp Consort. She has been soloist with The Estonian National Symphony, The Virginia Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Read more »

From the Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/david_patrick_stearns/20090331_What_do_women_want__Go_ask_Chaucer.html
Posted Tue. Mar. 31, 2009

What do women want? Go ask Chaucer

By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Classical Music Critic

Wendy Steiner

NEW YORK – Centuries collided last weekend in a smallish room in Chelsea Studios, where some of the biggest names in the early-music movement – from Anonymous 4 to Piffaro to soprano Julianne Baird – were collaborating in ways they’d never attempted.

The occasion was a rehearsal for the new Chaucer-inspired opera The Loathly Lady, premiering tomorrow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium. It requires musical specialists from a number of distant eras but sees them through a distinctly 21st-century lens.

“Can we make shawms and rebecs play a tango? I think we just did – and with such joy,” said conductor Gary Thor Wedow during a break. “It was like they’re playing hooky.”

Read more »

On the Road

Now that the final product is actually out there, for everyone to hear, I find myself looking back on the beginning stages of the Vespers. In case you don’t know, the composer, Kile Smith, is my father. I was living with my family while he was writing the piece, and I remember multiple times when he came to my room to ask if a particular passage would work on a particular instrument. I can’t imagine what it’s like to write music at all (I unfortunately did not inherit that gene), let alone write music for shawms and theorbos and contrabass dulcians.

The music that our instruments played historically was composed using a whole different set of rules from the ones used in writing modern music. Certain keys were never written in, or were only theoretical, in the Renaissance. Our instruments Read more »

The “Loathly Lady” interview on Crossover with Jill Pasternak is now online. Check it out here.

Piffaro takes off to New York City this weekend for rehearsal with Parthenia, Consort of Viols in preparation for the April 1 world premiere of The Loathly Lady in Philadelphia.