Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice.
If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened to it on the recent recording, you may agree with the judges who awarded the 35-minute work the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It masterfully blends the simple tragedy of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl going door-to-door, barefoot, selling matches on the coldest night of the year, with a Bach-style passion structure of alternating narrated story passages and vocal commentary.
Lang has now rescored the work for chorus, and that is the version that about 100 of us heard last night, at WNYC’s Greene Space down on Varick Street, with the New York Virtuoso Singers led by Harold Rosenbaum. read more
Composer David Lang, one of the co-founders of New York’s Bang on a Can, has been a prolific presence on the city’s contemporary music scene for more than twenty years. But even he admits that it came as something of a surprise when he was announced as the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Music for his work The Little Match Girl Passion (click here to hear the work on Carnegie Hall’s website), a heartbreakingly humble “opera” scored for just four voices and percussion. Lang sat down for an chat about the inception of the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired piece shortly after the Pulitzer announcement.
Download the interview as a podcast here, or listen to it as streaming audio after the jump. read more
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