Glen Roven
Glen Roven, four-time Emmy Award winner, is a composer, lyricist, conductor, pianist, translator and CD Producer. He co-created GPRrecords and then created RovenRecords.
He made his third Carnegie Hall appearance this March appearing with Bass-Baritone Daniel Okulitch who sang his concert music. The concert was also reprised in Santa Fe at the Opera. Roven made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting his Violin Concerto based on The Runaway Bunny, with Glenn Close and the American Symphony Orchestra and Catherine Zeta-Jones recorded the Piano Trio Version. He also recorded the piece with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Brooke Shields for Sony/BMG. Baritone Mark Stone performed an entire evening of Roven’s concert music also at Carnegie Hall. This past Mother’s Day, Soprano Lauren Flanigan debuted his Goodnight Moon, A Lullaby for Soprano and Orchestra, at a free concert in Central Park for 10,000 and has subsequently performed the piece at Alice Tully Hall, Kimmel Center, and all over the country. His 29 Song Cycles and Art Songs (billholabmusic.com) are routinely performed all around in the world. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard recently premiered some of his songs at her Carnegie Hall recital and will be recording all of his music for children. He has conducted the National Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, The Munich Philharmonic, The Radio Luxembourg Orchestra, as well as many others, and made his Israeli conducting debut in 2001 conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in two sold-out concerts honoring Leonard Bernstein. He has conducted for Renee Fleming, Placido Domingo, Jessye Norman, Erwin Schrot, Charles Castronovo and Kathleen Battle and was chosen to conduct four Presidential Inaugural Concerts, as well as America’s Millennium Celebration, produced by Steven Spielberg.
Goodnight Moon with Lauren Flanigan
Paul Pelkonan
Read the article from the Santa Fe Magazine
Pasatiempo and Glen Roven composing
The Santa Fe Songs
Roven's cycle, Song from the Underground comprises 15 songs--both dramatic and comedic--
which reveal a vived musical imagination.
Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone
Dominating the CD is Glen Roven’s from the Underground, a set of fifteen songs each with an isolated personality and texture, yet united by Mr. Roven’s mostly triadic and diatonic musical fabric. The piano imitates the vocal line in many of the songs, strengthening the reflection of, “[Mr. Roven’s] personal feelings about each poem”, which he describes is his goal when writing art songs. Repetitive rhythms in the piano accompaniments, combined with humorous texts gave some songs, like “This is Just to Say”,
the flavor of musical theater music (an affect that reappears in other cycles on this disc). Though I enjoyed the whole set, I felt the song “Come to the Edge” was the most beautiful – perhaps perfectly constructed – thanks to the absolutely engrossing way
the vocal line pairs with the piano. Mr. Okulitch’s part begins quietly, accompanied by timorous pandiatonic clusters in the piano, the two musical bodies simultaneous build momentum, energy and scope until the vocal line climaxes and the piano part
spills into a valley of lush extended triads, marking the most important moment in the poem.
Garrett Schumann, Sequenza
Arthur Leonard
Glen’s song cycle is gorgeous. He has set verses by Judith B. Herman, Justen Ahern and Angela M. Franklin, evoking the experience of spending time on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve never been to the Vineyard, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the feelings summoned up by this melding of verse and music, but I know a fine song cycle when I hear one, and this is a fine song cycle, expertly performed for this world premiere. My enthusiasm for American art song dates to my college years, when I fell deeply for Charles Ives’s songs. Ives really invented the naturalistic setting of idiomatic American verse, liberating us from the constraints of England’s folksong and Germanic-Mendelssohnian precedents, and I heard the same sort of freedom in Glen’s songs. Actually, most of the cycle is concerned with Judith Herman’s songs, six out of the eight numbers, and the two by Ahern and Franklin are the shortest songs, so I would consider this largely a Herman/Roven cycle, and the two combine wonderfully to enhance each other in a unified artistic expression.
You Deserve A Prince
Run Bun with Cath