Rime Sparse (2017) – for soprano and piano trio
Rime Sparse, composed in 2017, was “commissioned with love by Laura and Ricardo Rosenkranz on the joyous occasion of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and offered with gratitude and delight to The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.”
The first performances were given by Julia Bullock, Wu Han, Arnaud Sussmann , and Daniel Müller-Schott on March 8, 2017 at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center concert series at Harris Theater, Chicago, and on March 12, 2017 at Allice Tully Hall, New York.
Program notes:
Written over the course of forty years (from 1327 – 1368), Francesco Petrarch’s monumental collection of 366 canzoniere, titled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (fragments written in the vernacular) commonly known as Rime Sparse (scattered rhymes), spans the gamut of emotions associated with love – from first gaze to distant memory, from infatuation through exasperation, from gentle joy to pain and fury, through life and beyond death.
The poet’s object of desire has been speculatively associated with Laura de Noves, a married woman, six years younger than Petrarch. However, beyond the mortal beauty, Laura serves as a base from which deeply psychological perspectives on desire, devotion, and time are unfurled.
The work is framed with uncertainty with the repeating metaphor of being lost at sea on a rudderless boat. Vagueness moves from trepidation to uncontrollable desire, fusing fear and hope before returning to the sense of confusion caused by unbridled emotion.
New York Times: CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER, MARCH 12
If love is good, “why is it killing me?” That’s the sobering question the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch puts to himself in one of the innumerable love verses he wrote to a young married (hence unavailable) woman. The composer Jonathan Berger includes this text as the last of seven Petrarch settings in “Rime Sparse” (“Scattered Rhymes”), his new work for soprano, violin, cello and piano, recently introduced by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The beguiling soprano Julia Bullock drew out the wrenching ambiguity of this moment in her plaintive singing, backed by hazy instrumental sonorities that resist harmonic mooring. – Anthony Tommasini