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Reviews
"A couple of gems round out the recording. Edie Hill's This Floating World are musical illustrations of five haiku by the great Japanese poet Basho (translations by Robert Hass are included in the notes). On the strength of Chatterton's performance - a sketch-pad that includes a sky-lark, the harvest moon, winter solitude, a petal shower, and the Milky Way - the piece instantly takes its place among the staples of the solo flute repertoire."
"There were also two delightful portraits of animals on the program. In Dog from Duluth, Edie Hill’s simple, imaginative setting permitted the singers to luxuriate in misty, nostalgia over fond memories of a treasured companion."
"Edie Hill’s cycle The Giver of Stars: Six Poems of Amy Lowell opens the collection, leading off with “Pyrotechnics,” ... The song begins with a loud, attention-grabbing cluster in the bass register of piano, followed by a rapid glissando upward. The rest ... is delicate and impressionistic. “Vernal Equinox” has a restless, harmonically elusive accompaniment that reflects the poet’s uneasiness on a rainy, hyacinth-scented night... The cycle’s title song has a soaring second stanza (“Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me”), in which Koriath’s sound pulses opulently with longing."
-for The Giver of Stars as it appears on "These Distances Between Us"
Full review available to Opera News subscribers on their website.
"...it is the album's centerpiece [Spectral Spirits] that is the major attraction. ... Hill's music evokes the bird in its particularity, and the overall effect of this is profoundly sad. It probably takes a virtuoso choir like The Crossing to do the work justice, but one may nevertheless hope that it becomes more widely performed on programs devoted to environmental themes. This is an especially strong outing from one of the most distinctive American choral ensembles."
"...consistently beguiling."
"Hill's elegy [Spectral Spirits] is affecting in accentuating the losses that accrue from such habitual modes of thinking and operating. After listening to this mesmerizing construction, we would do well to attend to the words Montalbano and the others deliver in the work's prelude, 'Take note. These birds are still singing to us. We must listen.'"
"[Spectral Spirits] for soloist and chorus, plethoric and robust, is performed by a fully committed choir with rigor and intensity, and by soloists who, in perfect balance, capture the wisdom of Hill's music and the words of Holly J. Hughes, Henry David Thoreau, Gert Goebel, Christopher Cokinos, Lucien M. Turner, Paul A. Johnsgard, and Alexander Wilson."
Translated from Catalan
In Spectral Spirits, Edie finds so much joy and exuberance in describing [the Carolina Parakeets'] motion, their colors, their uniqueness: a composer writing about animals that are close to her.
Full Rising w/The Crossing write-up
"There are so many reasons we love to sing Poem for 2084...there is Edie's extraordinary understanding of how contrapuntal voices can make indivisible musical fabrics out of highly individualized melodic lines; everyone has a wonderfully inventive part to sing, and we all love listening to how each individual part interacts with the others!"
Full Rising w/The Crossing write-up
"We love to sing We Bloomed In Spring because of Edie’s command of – no, her accord with – rhetoric; how conversations shift, how our inner dialogue has its own story. Her music makes rhetorical detours that feel exactly like what our brains do: we lunge forward with urgency...then stop and rethink, tempered."
"Hill's Spectral Spirits...addresses the plight of endangered or recently extinct birds in a 30-minute meditation on nature and loss, shot through with flashes of humor and an occasional dash of hope."
"It's ear-ravishing music, full of bare harmonies and melismatic solo lines, and the poetry is to die for..."
"—an almost Wes Andersonian cabinet of wonders."
"Species rise and fall again, with little sentimentality. As much as Hill may have grieved each loss, we’re given a slightly blanker canvas to project whatever hue of grief we ourselves feel in the moment."
-for Spectral Spirits as it appears on "Born"
"...the overall effect is haunting."
"...Spectral Spirits is one of the most interesting and engaging new compositions that I have heard in quite some time. Brava, Ms. Hill!"
"When [Passenger Pigeon] takes off, Edie taps the stunning depth of her awe for flying creatures in music of intense motion and speed. She grabs hold of the notes and commands them to capture – to be – the energy and spectacle of millions of birds covering the sky."
Full Rising w/The Crossing write-up
"
[The program] also includes Edie Hill’s startling but beautiful work 'Blue Jewel,' which is part of the 'Glass Works Collection' heard on 'Of and Between.'"
“'Blue Jewel' ...exemplifies the vibrant music-making of Rochester’s preeminent professional avant-classical ensemble."
"...poignant."
"In 'A Sound Like This,' she seizes six Bly paraphrases of the Indian mystic Kabir by the scruff of the neck and never lets go. Sung in near-darkness, her opening movement, with its whispered entreaties to 'Listen' and 'Wake up,' is arresting, and her invention never flags."
"Hill allows lines and themes to develop and evolve almost below a listener's ear. She doesn't hike the dynamic and tempo to build intensity. Her music is rife with quiet, and some of the quietest passages are the most intense."
"Edie Hill’s choral writing in “Spectral Spirits” is expert. She employs a smoothly unfolding harmonic language that is beautifully voiced between the highest and lowest ranges of the choristers, evoking the feel of the skies against which the flocks of birds fly and the trees upon which they sing their threatened songs."
"...bold...radiant, deftly crafted..."
"...[Spectral Spirits] quickly establishes its power to touch both heart and mind with its rich, polychordal harmonies."
"...[Hill's writing] displayed a madrigalist's ear for sonic detail and word setting..."
"[Evolutionary Spirits] takes its title from a line in Hill's opening Poem for 2084, a prototypically splendid example of The Crossing's artistry. For six minutes, the male and female singers swell in glorious harmony; clarity of intonation and diction is omnipresent regardless of whether the voices loudly declaim or drop to a whisper. With the vocals soaring, Hill's piece (with text by Joan Wolf Prefontaine) exudes an ethereal mysticism as it muses on the state of the world."
"[Edie Hill: Clay Jug] was among the finest choral releases in Navona’s catalogue."
"[Evolutionary Spirits] opens with Hill’s Poem for 2084 which features gorgeous lines with ancient modes and settings reminiscent of the late Middle Ages. The harmonies move from these more ethereal open sounds to closer dissonant clusters. A similar approach occurs in the penultimate track, Marvelous Error!.
"The creativity of another contemporary artist, Edie Hill, has a similar meaning - her music is often called 'an evocation of magic'. Two of her compositions presented here, Poem for 2084 and Marvellous Error!, are both distinctive of its mysticism of the unclear draw of harmonic structures. The solo soprano line in Poem for 2084 creates tough dynamic effects. Thus the effective bright and the hidden/unclear take place in the piece as the contrasting forces that manage the world of sound. This distinctive power in Edie Hill's music and The Crossing's strength of performance create a very compelling listening experience."
“Last July we had a glorious week immersed in the lush, thoughtful music of Edie Hill. We took great care in setting down a full CD of her works, with Edie in the room - works like Cancion de el Alma, a work that leaps, tumbles, reaches for the sky, and settles in undulating waves and rich harmonic clouds. The result is another new release from The Crossing, out today on Navona Records, in which we get to do what we love most: sing beautiful music.
Thanks Edie for sharing your art with us.”
"Edie Hill offers a diverse collection of works on Clay Jug. She manages to shift the listener’s perspective of the choir from to track to track...For me, choir music can elate my soul, or leave me cold, depending on how its performed. Here, on every track, I found something beautiful to get excited about; something to touch the soul... and to me, that's what classical music should be all about."
"She is especially adept at setting several different languages in very attractive ways...Hill is very skilled at selecting rich and ‘music ready’ texts as well...There is a fascinating sound that permeates her work with moments of clear “modernity” alongside timbres, voicings and mood that owe a lot to the Renaissance and the ars antiqua of Spain among others."
"Mesmerizing Choral Music"
"The different solo instrument colors weave intricately through the choral texture with an at times almost mesmerizing vibraphone idea adding a magical sense to the gorgeous harmonic writing in the central movement. An ancient quality appears in the final “Paleolithic Flute” with an intriguing solo line seeming to pull as back in time. The end result is an often intriguing blend of harmony and pure choral quality that is a sort of American parallel to some of the more familiar English choral music at the end of the 20th Century."
-for From the Wingbone of a Swan
"Each of the smaller works explores different languages exhibiting Hill’s deftness and crafting fascinating sounds out of these texts whether from Anglo-Saxon (The Phoenix), Spanish (Cancion De El Alma), or Latin (Alma Beata Et Bella)."
"Such fine vocal writing allows the singer and conductor to simply follow the score in letting the sound of the composition speak for itself"
-Paul Laprade on An Illuminated Transience
Cancion de el alma hailed as "a revelation."
A "masterpiece"
Regarding the world premiere of Cancion de el alma by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
“...When Edie Hill's 'A Sound Like This' began, with its urgent exhortation to “Listen!,” I just about jumped out of my skin...You'd think that triggering my fight or flight response might have been an unpleasant experience, but I just sat there grinning...Then Cantus began singing harmonies that chased around the soundstage before blooming into a major chord – all interspersed with more whispered exclamations...and my grin stretched to rival Heath Ledger's.”
"A True Heart is Waiting is flat-out beautiful—deep and tuneful and full of mystery that resists your knowing it too well."
(for TTBB voices, premiered by Cantus)