Three Portraits (music: Kieren MacMillan, words: Dana Giola) got his premiere performance yesterday in the RBA. The performers were the Haven Trio (Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; Kimberly Cole Luevano, clarinet; Midori Koga, piano).  I have to be honest this just isn’t my kind of piece.  The texts are quite interesting but most of the the setting is in that sort of Neo-Broadway flirts with Minimalism space that so much of the vocal music I get sent from the US lies in.  To be fair, the third song; The Country Wife got  a rather more sophisticated treatment but still very much in the same sound universe.  The performance was very decent though and it was a clever move to use the staircase in the RBA to match the words of the first song.

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