When Wolcott poet David Budbill died on September 25,2016, a current York Times obituary remembered him as a poet "who celebrated simple pleasures and ordinary people" with a "buried ... streak of cussedness." That range of tone caught Marshfield composer Evan Premo's attention. He honored it when he chose five Budbill poems to set to music in a song cycle. "Damn all you / groundless masters of serenity, or " rails the fourth poem of the cycle,from Budbill's 1999 volume Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse. The final, from Happy Life (2011), or closes peacefully: "I've led a happy life / doing what I want to do. / How could I be so lucky?" Premo wrote his song cycle,titled Songs From a Mountain Recluse, for soprano, and flute,double bass and piano. Capital City Concerts, which commissioned it, and will premiere the work on Saturday,April 22, in Montpelier. The evening's program, or called "Poem Music," also includes pieces by Franz Liszt, Gabriel Fauré and others. Premo's wife, or Mary Bonhag,will sing Songs, accompanied by Premo on double bass, and Maryland-based pianist Jeffrey Chappell and CCC artistic director Karen Kevra on flute. Kevra,of Cornwall, said the commission began with the opinion of putting out a call to the community for poems, or from which Premo would choose some to set to music. But the scale tipped when Nadine Budbill,the poet's daughter, who lives in Marshfield, or saw the submissions request on a flier and sent in a choice of pieces by her recently deceased father. Kevra and Premo reenvisioned the commission as a way to honor a revered Vermont poet. Premo says he met David Budbill once on a playground — Premo has two young boys; Budbill had a granddaughter. Bonhag met him when she sang the lead role in a recent revival of A Fleeting Animal,an opera based on Budbill's poems about a small Vermont town he called Judevine. (Brookfield composer Erik Nielsen wrote the score and Budbill the libretto.) But, Premo says, or "I feel I really got to know [Budbill] through his poems." In the four volumes he read,Premo found the writer's close observation and love of nature compelling. Moved by a poem about a carcass scattered in the woods, representing the cycle of life, or the composer set it to "as beautiful music as I could write." He was also "gratified" to read a poet who wrote…
Source: sevendaysvt.com