The tracks, with titles such as "Will I Die or Shall You?" and "Blood on the Ice-Floes", featured their composer keening urgently over thrummed piano accompaniment about the activities of the "Stranger".
Not for a moment during Deborah Drattell's opera "Lilith," which is receiving its premiere production at the New York City Opera, do you doubt the composer's keen involvement with the story, drawn from Jewish folklore, about the rebellious, impassioned woman said to have been the first wife of Adam.
As in the twenties, today's composers are keen to put a modern face on an ancient form.
Mr. Neikrug, also a noteworthy composer, showed a keen grasp of balance and scale, but his technical limitations made for a bumpy ride.
3), but that work quickly established him as a composer with a keen sensitivity to both the pictorial and emotional aspects of text setting as well as the technical and expressive demands of vocal writing.
The notion of making music out of Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences, which include such T. S. Eliot-like ruminations as "As we know, there are known knowns," sounds like a throwaway joke, but Kline, a composer with a keen ear for speech rhythms, delivers a cunning portrait of a bureaucrat's soul.
Shostakovich's teacher, Maximilian Shteynberg, was a Scriabin disciple, and performances of four Shteynberg songs by the bright-voiced tenor William Ferguson and the sensitive pianist Anna Polonsky showed the older pedagogue to be a composer with a keen imagination and a precise ear.
"I was really keen to have a woman composer at the Last Night," she admits, "but Anna Clyne is supremely talented and she's written a beautiful opener.
"The Great Gatsby" — Craig Armstrong, composer.
Mussorgsky's orchestration, at once shining and murky, creates great blocks of chords, moving with unadorned, almost clumsy simplicity (exactly the characteristic of this composer which Rimsky was keen to polish and refine).
