CD Review: Innocence Lost: The Berg-Debussy Project
AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, September 2009
“…a fascinating release and a welcome introduction to some composers whose names are not well known.”
The Nessinger-Golan Duo has been performing together since about 2000 and exploring links and tensions between music past and present. With Lost Innocence: The Berg-Debussy Project they asked 10 American composers from a variety of backgrounds to write songs in response to 10 songs from hear the beginning of the 20th Century-Debussy’s Chanson de Bilitis and Berg’s Fruehe Lieder. The matching of songs and composers was done by drawing slips of paper from a breadbasket; and each composer, according to the notes by Golan, was asked “to write a piece for voice and piano with a text of their choice, whose impulse stemmed from the original song”. This ingenious idea has produced fascinating results that are like new cycles, each in some way reflecting its original…
[This is] a fascinating release and a welcome introduction to some composers whose names are not well known: Eleanor Sandresky, Jorge Martin, Daniel Rothman, Anna Weesner, Joe Kerr, Lee Hyla, Tom Cipullo, and Eric Moe. Good notes; texts and translations.
R. Moore