Stephen Scott: The Deep Spaces

The Bowed Piano Ensemble, Victoria Hanson, soprano "The Deep Spaces, the most recent in my series of bowed piano compositions, is a fantasy song-cycle celebrating the power and grandeur—evoked by poets and composers over two millennia—of one of the world's most dazzling and enchanting locales: Lake Como, surely the brightest jewel in the crown of alps and mountain lakes that adorns Italy's far north, just below Switzerland. The song texts, set for soprano soloist with the ensemble serving as accompanying orchestra (and, occasionally, chorus), are taken from writers as distant in time, culture, psychology and aesthetic stance from one another as Pliny the Younger, aristocratic native of Como and chronicler of many aspects of Roman life in the first and second centuries A.D., William Wordsworth, whose poetry celebrates both the Lake District of his native England and the Italian Lake District he loved, and Pablo Medina, a twenty-first century poet and novelist of Cuban ancestry residing