Andrew Mark Sauerwein

The Five Stevenson Songs were commissioned and premiered by soprano Angela Case.  She helped select texts from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, which were sequenced to reflect "the journey of the imagination."  The poetry suggests at once the simplicity of a child's vantage point and the seasoned wisdom of old age.  The first and fifth settings call up a nostalgic, folklike style couched in an expansive, elaborate musical environment.  The trilogy comprising "Northwest Passage" (which retains Stevenson's title and order) assumes a more direct expression of the thoughts and images in the poetry, beginning and ending in relative tonal comfort but passing through the darkness of a more abstract idiom.  The point, however, is not the music itself but its draught of the poet's brew of youthful vision and old-age musing.