New Lee Hoiby CD

Lee Hoiby's piano quartet Dark Rosaleen—Rhapsody on an Air by James Joyce features on a new Albany Troy CD of new American piano quartets performed by The Ames Piano Quartet. Composed in 2000, Rosaleen was commissioned by the Ames Town and Gown Chamber Music Association for its 50th anniversary. Hoiby commented:

"It provided me at last an opportunity both to compose for an instrumental combination for which I had not previously written, and to use a melody composed by author James Joyce that I had been saving for years for the right opportunity."

The father of a college roommate of Hoiby had known Joyce and passed the melody along to him, as well as a recounting of Joyce frequently singing the melody and playing the piano as a young adult. Hoiby uses the melody as the foundation of the work, and it isn't difficult to find the tune in the work, as it begins with a solo viola invoking Joyce's tune.

The work has also garnered rave reviews. In a recent issue, Fanfare offered the following:

"The program notes characterize the piece as one "in which a lightly knit thought process is balanced by a lyrical, expansive and free soundscape"; indeed, it is one of the most thoroughly "wrought" works I have heard from this composer, as the theme's basic motif finds its way into virtually every nook and cranny, so to speak. In one movement, it is a grandly impassioned outpouring, utterly sincere, yet with a grammar and vocabulary that would have been fully comprehensible to, say, Gabriel Fauré. Hoiby is one of the few remaining composers who would choose to use a language like this, and one of the fewer still who can use it well enough to compel attention. Recent works for piano quartet are few in number. Dark Rosaleen is definitely one of the most gratifying, and the Ames ensemble does a beautiful job with it."