Maria Schneider

• • GRAMMY WINNER Maria Schneider (Best Contemporary Classical Composition, “Winter Morning Walks")

• • GRAMMY WINNER
• Dawn Upshaw (Best Classical Vocal Solo Performance)

• •GRAMMY WINNER
• David Frost, Tim Martyn, and Brian Losch (Best Engineered Album, Classical)

Maria Schneider is best known as a big-band leader and arranger, who began her career in the 1980s working with Gil Evans. To judge from this pair of song cycles, both composed for soprano Dawn Upshaw, her own music seems to occupy the hazily defined territory bounded by jazz, contemporary classical styles and the Broadway musical.

In the 2008 Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories, based on English translations of texts by the Brazilian poet, the result is rather bland, but in the settings of poems by Ted Kooser Winter Morning Walks, it's beguilingly effective. Upshaw's voice is surrounded with an improvising trio of clarinet, bass and piano, leaving the Australian Chamber Orchestra to create the bigger musical pictures; some of the poised vocal writing recalls the lyrical beauty of Samuel Barber's Knoxville, other passages come closer to Sondheim, while there are occasional echoes of Copland in the orchestral writing. But the whole amalgam hangs together in a touching, yet never sentimental way, and Upshaw makes every word, every note, matter.

TRACKS:

• WINTER MORNING WALKS
• 01. Winter Morning Walks: Perfectly Still This Morning Solstice
• 02. When I Switched On a Light
• 03. Walking by Flashlight
• 04. I Saw a Dust Devil this Morning
• 05. My Wife and I Walk the Cold Road
• 06. All Night, in Gusty Winds
• 07. Our Finch Feeder
• 08. Spring, the Sky Rippled with Geese
• 09. How Important It Must Be
• CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE STORIES
• 10. Prologue
• 11. The Dead in Frock Coats
• 12. Souvenir of the Ancient World
• 13. Don't Kill Yourself
• 14. Quadrille