Announcing A Second Release from Composer Rodney Lister

Métier Records (the new-music arm of Divine Art Recordings) is delighted to announce the forthcoming release of an album of choral music by New England composer Rodney Lister, following a recording of chamber and vocal works (‘Faith-Based Initiatives’, Métier MSV 28618) which will hit the streets and online stores on September 9.

The new album (title not yet decided) will be performed by the members of the Church of the Advent, Boston, Massachusetts conducted by Mark Dwyer with pianist Julia Carty, and recording is due to take place in September, with a release date of early spring 2023.

Rodney Lister has been teaching at Greenwood Music Camp in western Massachusetts for around 30 years. The facility, described by Rebecca Fischer as “an intensive musical experience for teenagers in a natural environment, fertile for personal and artistic growth and development.”, has been the springboard for the development of countless musical careers.  While the program is primarily focused on chamber music, all students also participate in the camp choir, and almost every year Rodney Lister has composed new choral works – which although intended to be ‘tried-out’ by the campers, are in no way less than first class compositions of distinction. Partly inspired by his teachers Peter Maxwell Davies, who wrote stunning works for ‘less experienced performers’, and Virgil Thomson, with his innate gift for brilliant settings, Lister began setting texts by leading poets in a fairly transparent tonal language. After a while he began to expand into a more complex and fluid tonality, inspired by Virgil Thomson’s Wheat Fields at Noon and perhaps surprisingly, also by Gesualdo’s modal motet Morro Lasso.

Rodney Lister was co-founder and director of “Music Here and Now”, a concert series for new music by New England composers, has received a great number of commissions and fellowships and has had his music performed by leading artists at Tanglewood, Edinburgh Fringe, the Library of Congress and many other venues from New York to London. He has also been a busy and sought-after pianist.  Rodney is currently on the faculties of Boston School of Music and the preparatory school of the New England Conservatory, as well as teaching at Harvard University and playing a leading role at Greenwood Music Camp.  Stephen Sutton, CEO at Divine Art Recordings’ USA office, said, “It was very good news to hear that Rodney wished to present a recording of his choral work; having recently put together his first album for Métier, I was aware that we have here a very fine composer deserving of even greater international recognition, who creates superb works which seem to be mainstream, individualistic and inventive all at the same time.”

Choral music by Rodney Lister

Label: Métier
Catalog number: MSV 28630
Performers: Choir of the church of the Advent, Boston, Mass
Conductor: Mark Dwyer
Piano: Julia Carty
Works – this is a working program and final tracks will be most but not all of these. Author of text named in parentheses:

• Of Mere Being – five poems (Wallace Stevens)
• Stanzas in Meditation – Stanzas XV, XVI and XXXVIII (Gertrude Stein)
• Three Poems of Richard Wilbur (Richard Wilbur)
• The Bees (David Feny)
• A Downward Look (James Merrill)
• On the Road Home (Wallace Stevens)
• To the Harbormaster (Frank O’Hara)
• The Lost Feed (Kenneth Koch)
• Once by the Pacific (Robert Frost)
• Our Revels are now Ended (William Shakespeare)
• A Supermarket in California (Alan Ginsberg)
• This is the Garden (e.e. cummings)
• To the Republic (Frank Bidart)
• Vanishing Point (Lawrence Raab)
• To a Waterfowl (William Cullen Bryant)
• Carol (Donald Hall)
• The Awakening (Willam Carlos Williams)
• Never Give all the Heart (William Butler Yeats)
• The Choirmaster’s Burial (Thomas Hardy)
• The Mockingbird (Randall Jarrell)
• The Gift (William Carlos Williams)
• The Annunciation (Wystan Hugh Auden)