Bright Shiny Things Releases Baritone Brian Mulligan's Alburnum, Songs by Greg Spears, Missy Mazzoli and Mason Bates, Accompanied by Timothy Long

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES BARITONE BRIAN MULLIGAN’S ALBURNUM, 
SONGS BY GREG SPEARS, MISSY MAZZOLI AND MASON BATES, ACCOMPANIED 
BY TIMOTHY LONG ON PIANO

NEW YORK, NY–On November 11, 2022, Bright Shiny Things releases Alburnum [BSTC-0170], an album of world premiere recordings featuring baritone Brian Mulligan and collaborative pianist, Timothy Long. Hailed by the Financial Times to be “riveting … a fine, strong, open baritone,” the album’s repertoire includes the critically-acclaimed cycle, Walden,by Gregory Spears, which was composed for Mulligan; Missy Mazzoli’s As Long As We Live; and Mason Bates’s Songs From the Plays. Alburnum is available for pre-order at: https://www.brightshiny.ninja/alburnum

Mulligan’s album title comes from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where the singer first encountered the word. Defined in the liner notes as “the delicate, outer layers of recently grown wood found between the heartwood and the bark of a tree,” the metaphorical value of alburnum resonated with Mulligan immediately. He explains:

“I’ve wanted to create an album of world premiere recordings, my own contribution to the living, growing tree of music. After years of searching for the songs on this program, I knew these were the right ones for me. These are songs that I hope are going to be around for a good while, songs that will work their way into your heart, and into the heartwood of American Song.”

Gregory Spears’s Walden, using excerpts from Thoreau’s classic, consists of four songs and a coda arranged as a loose narrative of the author’s journey away from and back to society. Inspired by Thoreau’s idea of finding the sublime in the simplest of materials, Spears began with a very limited palette of pitches: two-note melodies in the voice emphasizing roots and fifths, and very simple exercise-like figures in the piano. Some complexity develops through the layering of these materials, but throughout the cycle the guiding principle is simplicity, as it was for Thoreau in his rustic retreat. Reviewing the work after its 2018 premiere, the Washington Post raved: “Harmony, rhythm and texture all seem elementally direct and transparent. Cumulatively, however, they become the vehicle for intense, varied and powerful emotional complexity.”

The text for Missy Mazzoli’s As Long As We Live is an excerpt from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” from his 1856 collection Leaves of Grass. Mazzoli provides ecstatic music for the poet’s words, which echo Thoreau’s in their rejection of the trappings of normalcy in favor of a free life of wandering, but not alone: love remains when all else is stripped away. The setting is perhaps most striking at the end, when the energetic piano accompaniment suddenly drops away, leaving the singer’s final question to ring unaccompanied: “Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?” 

For Songs From the Plays, Mason Bates selected poems from a collection of the same name by New York poet Kenneth Koch. As Bates describes the poems: “It is as if we have found the most exquisite cornice of a vanished cathedral, and its beautiful craftsmanship soon makes us forget from where it came.” Bates groups his selections around the themes of love, friendship and art. “Bring Back the Beds” is a nostalgic memory of the kinds of little details remembered by lovers. “They Say Prince Hamlet’s Found a Southern Island” has a barcarole feel, appropriate to its exotic setting, and is a witty what-might-have-been fantasy about two tragic figures from Shakespeare. “This Dancing Man Was Once the Pope” and the following song, “When I Was a Young Woman,” moves from the theme of love to friendship and socializing, and this time the characters in the fantasy are Pope Pius XII and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. “Your Genius Made Me Shiver” charts a friendship that also contains artistic rivalry and envy, and the theme of art continues with “What Makes This Statue Noble Seeming.” Finally, “You Want a Social Life, With Friends” wraps up the cycle by juxtaposing Bates’s three themes: of the three, the lyrics explain, one might be lucky enough to find two; attempt more and time will simply run out.

TRACK LIST:

Gregory Spears
Walden

I. I went to the woods
II. Sometimes, on Sundays
III. Time is but the stream
IV. I left the woods

Missy Mazzoli
As Long as We Live

Mason Bates
Songs from the Plays

I. Bring Back the Beds
II. They Say Prince Hamlet’s Found a Southern Island
III. This Dancing Man Was Once the Pope
IV. When I Was a Young Woman
V. Your Genius Made Me Shiver
VI. What Makes This Statue Noble
VII. You Want a Social Life, With Friends

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS: 

American baritone Brian Mulligan performs throughout the United States and Europe, with recent appearances at Opera National de Paris, the Salzburger Festspiele, the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Winer Staatsoper, Dutch National Opera, Opernhaus Zürich, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Canadian Opera Company and the Wxford Opera Festival. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Brian Mulligan has premiered several works in his career, including Songs for Adam by James Primosch with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Walden by Greg Spears for the Kennedy Center and the role of Jack Torrance in The Shining by Paul Moravec with Minnesota Opera. Brian Mulligan has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos and Warner. 

Timothy Long is a pianist and conductor of Muscogee, Thlopthlocco, and Choctaw descent who is Music Director of Opera at the Eastman School of Music. After working on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival, Tim was appointed by Robert Spano to be his associate conductor for three years at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera for two seasons. His early training as a pianist and violinist led to work with singers, and eventually to conducting engagements that have included companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, Wof Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Pacifi Opera Victoria, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, the Prague Summer Nights Festival Orchestra, and off-Broadway with The New Group.