poster for 2007 Bridging the Ages 6
× Composers throughout history have drawn on music foreign to their heritage to enrich their own language and build musical bridges between lands and peoples. This disc begins with sets of songs by two composers separated by more than one and a half centuries but united in this common inspiration. Ludwig van Beethoven, the quintessential composer bridging German Classicism and Romanticism, arranged British folksongs throughout more than a decade of his career, while the American composer Marc Neikrug honored Native American culture with his Pueblo Children's Songs, composed in 1995. (Both performances feature the renowned soprano Heidi Grant Murphy in her festival debut.) The disc closes with the magnificent Suite for Two Violins, Cello, and Piano by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a work borne of the piano's limitless sonic possibilities and in which the pianist—here, the inimitable Gary Graffman—uses only the left hand.