"Songs from Delmore Schwartz" by Rodney Lister

"Songs from Delmore Schwartz"
by Rodney Lister (USA, b. 1951)

2. Far Rockaway
3. That Beautiful American Word Sure 4:24
4. Ballad of the Children of the Czar 8:06

Ceceilia Allwein, soprano
Diane Heffner, clarinet
Yukiko Shimazaki, piano
Mark Berger, viola

Rodney Lister, conductor

Performed live at Boston University's Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
on February 1, 2012

During the
ALEA III concert:
"BU Composers Conduct their Own Works".

More information is available here

This is a live archival recording.

The composer provides the following note:

"I first knew anything about Delmore Schwartz from reading Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (where Humboldt is Delmore Schwarts, and everything that happened between the narrator of the book and Humboldt happened in “real” life between Bellow and Schwartz). I got further interested in Schwartz through the wonderful biography of him by James Atlas, and from talking about him with Arthur Berger, who had been a close friend of Schwartz's for a while. Finally I got interested enough to actually get to know any of his work, a lot of which, including the short story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and some number of the poems, are really wonderful. These songs are three of a set of four written over a number of years for a number of reasons. The first (not to be played tonight), The Ghosts of James and Peirce in Harvard Yard, was written to be done in a concert to be give at Harvard one summer a long time ago. It seemed appropriate to set a poem of Schwartz as an 80th birthday present for Arthur Berger, so I set Far Rockaway for a concert celebrating that event. (I have only the vaguest notion of where Far Rockaway actually is.) That Beautiful American Word Sure was written as present for Esther Geller, the wife of Harold Shapero, who also had been friend of Delmore's. The Ballad of the Children of the Czar (which I think very well may Schwart's best poem) was written for a Dinosaur Annex concert, and also was a 60th birthday present for Peter Maxwell Davies. Max, of course, had no connection to Schwartz at all, but it was time to do something to finish the set, and that seemed like a good reason for doing it."

The info above is available here