“Susa always kept his eye on the prize of meaning.…and the result is a thoroughly engaging song cycle in the strictest sense of that term. Bohlin’s conducting seemed to recognize this fundamental role of the narrative, making the performance of this cycle an absorbing opening to the evening.… Conte’s first Whitman setting, entitled A Whitman Triptych, amounted to a premiere performance. Conte had set the first and last of the three texts in the set in 2012, but the central selection was only completed last year. As a result this was the first performance of the three pieces performed together and in the order the composer wished. … Each of the “panels’ of Conte’s triptych is thus extracted from a longer source. In each case the selection was a well-chosen one for both its semantic coherence and for its accommodation of meaning to musical setting. Images abound in these texts, and Conte has a keen sense of how to translate those images into richly imaginative harmonic progressions.” —Stephen Smoliar, Examiner
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