Life Stories

Life Stories brings together soprano Claire Booth and pianist Jâms Coleman in a vibrant program exploring the borderland between classical song and cabaret. At it's center is Zoë Martlew's Hotel Babylon, a contemporary cycle written for Booth: seven sharply drawn character studies that trace a playful yet unsettling journey through temptation, vice and redemption. Blending cabaret, expressionism, tango and baroque echoes, Martlew's music creates a modern counterpart to Schoenberg's Brettl-Lieder, reimagined for the 21st century. Surrounding this new work is a constellation of composers who also navigate the everyday and the existential through song. Gershwin's The Man I Love and I Got Rhythm offer melodic clarity and bittersweet simplicity; Eisler's Hollywooder Liederbuch excerpts deliver intimate, politically charged reflections from the composer's American exile; and Poulenc's Banalités reveals profound emotion beneath it's surface wit and elegance. Earl Wild's piano transcriptions of Gershwin bring Romantic virtuosity into dialogue with the album's lyrical core. The program concludes with Thomas Adès' Life Story, a candid, fragmented setting of Tennessee Williams that mirrors the fragile human connections running through the disc. Together, these works form a compelling portrait of storytelling in song-by turns ironic, tender, biting, and deeply humane.

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