ten/db/pno. Duration: 9:00. Full Score. See also Score & Parts.

   by Paul A. Epstein

   poems by Harvey Gilman

1. Isolation

2. Rapport

3. Threnody

Harvey Gilman’s Sonnets form a series of portraits of two lovers. The poems touch on deep-seated and contradictory longings for individual identity and autonomy and for intimate communion with another. The mood is intense yet ambiguous, at various times tender, ironic, profoundly sad, or coldly analytical. The perspective shifts in stages from close up and immediate to remote and reflective.

In each song the piano presents an abstract landscape of musical patterns. The vocal line, while apparently independent of the piano in its rhythmic fluidity and lyrical phrasing, emerges directly from the same patterns. The contrabass is essentially a second voice, suggesting in its alternation between rhythmic unison with the singer and counterpoint the ambivalence of the lovers.