Booth Glynn - Unorthodox Music (CD)

Facts First Percy Grainger: Folk Music, then Edvard Grieg: Lyric Music, and now Modest Mussorgsky: Unorthodox Music - a logical sequence in soprano Claire Booth's and pianist Christopher Glynn's growing AVIE discography, interspersing a selection of under-represented songs with solo piano works by this most individual and idiosyncratic of all Russian composers. Claire and Chris approach Modest Mussorgsky: Unorthodox Music in the spirit of a storyteller, tracing an arc of life from innocence to experience that is arranged across a prologue and four "scenes" - Nursery, Youthful Years, Marriage and Loneliness - taking their cue from the colorful tableaux of the composer's operas. Individual numbers from the great song cycles - Youthful Years, Nursery, Sunless, and Songs and Dances of Death - are juxtaposed with works from Mussorgsky's more unorthodox output, all delivered by Claire and Chris with disarming affect.