2017 Perera: Crossing the Meridian/Boston Musica Viva

Date
Cambridge, MA, USA
Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music of Bard College 27 Garden St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Perera: Crossing the Meridian/Boston Musica Viva
Time
8:00 pm

Ronald Perera: Crossing the Meridian (song cycle with chamber ensemble)
Boston Musica Viva, Richard Pittman, conductor

From the Boston Musica Viva website:

Crossing the Meridian, a favorite work from the BMV archives by Ronald Perera, features tenor Charles Blandy singing texts by five very different American poets, exploring an array of challenging journeys from the physical to the emotional.

“Celestial navigators check their longitude by timing the exact moment the sun crosses their meridian. At this transit the sun seems to hang at its zenith, neither rising nor descending. So, also, can our lives seem to hang still in a moment of passage. Crossing the Meridian is about those moments when time can seem almost frozen to us, about those eternal-seeming moments when we perceive ourselves in the middle of the experience.” —Ronald Perera

I sang this cycle with Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2009. It’s a treat. Poems by Ruth Whitman, James Dickey (of Deliverance fame), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane, e.g.:

In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.