Mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich and pianist Jeffrey LaDeur perform excerpts from Mark Abel’s song cycle “1966,” a composition on Abel’s Delos album Spectrum:
1966
1966 was written for Kindra Scharich and her close colleague Jeffrey LaDeur. The cycle evokes the long-ago year when I turned 18 – a magic and unsettling time filled with life-altering events. The songs concern a romance during a stint of near imprisonment in a boarding school, a hike taken on a solo drive from East Coast to West, arrival in San Francisco as the alternative youth culture was making its presence felt for the first time. The first two songs derive from poems I wrote that very autumn, with refinements made more than a half-century later. 1966 is an “interior” work, but I hope it captures at least some of the zeitgeist of that wide-eyed, wide-open and achingly brief era.