Songs of Orpheus

At once sensual and existential, Songs of Orpheus is a collection of songs composed across 125 years that meditates on nature and nostalgia, sex and love, the ephemerality of the human spirit, and the eternal, transformative power of art.

These song cycles of Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, George Crumb, and Robert Spano coalesce into a testament to the limitless potency and fragility of love—both its resplendent joys and its tender sorrows. Despite love’s transience and riskiness, the album compels us to ruminate on Rilke’s witticism that “for one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…’’

Each of the cycles presents us with existential questions of life and death, love and loss, but the album is structured in couplets. Debussy and Spano draw upon Ancient Greece, Grieg and Crumb draw upon enchantments of nature, the temporality of love, life, and memory. Claude Debussy’s ethereal Chansons de Bilitis (1899) evokes a lusty, Grecian fever dream where the tumescence of love and desire comes to the fore.

Robert Spano’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2020) lends voice to Rilke’s enigmatic eponymous poetry. Spano’s setting of the songs—the intimate conversation between piano and soprano—“draws one voice out of two separate strings.” Meanwhile, George Crumb’s Three Early Songs (1947) emerge as whispered secrets, darkly-hued odes to impermanent nature—night, a flower, and wind. The songs lead us to ponder the difference between the actual and the seeming.

Kelley O’Connor, Mezzo-Soprano
Robert Spano, Pianist