Sarah Kirkland Snider caps off a momentous year in music with a major world premiere in Washington, D.C. Urge is a new orchestral song cycle set to an original poem by celebrated writer Tracy K. Smith, written especially for acclaimed bass-baritone Will Liverman. Teddy Abrams leads Liverman and National Symphony Orchestra for the piece's first performances November 12 and 14 at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium. Urge is commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Aspen Music Festival and School as a meditation on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
"There are many ways to interpret the meaning of URGE, particularly as a response to this national milestone," notes Sarah Kirkland Snider. "In the orchestra, I knew immediately that I wanted the music to conjure a few distinct ideas: a sense of epic, ancient time; the breath of a song in the wind; and a quiet tenderness—a moment of heartache for our shared ephemerality, and for the fact that we have so often struggled to be good to each other and the living world around us. Ultimately, however, Tracy's poem is as much about hope as it is about clear-eyed observation, and I strove to let the music carry that hope forward....What Tracy wrote struck me not as a political statement, but as an ode to life and to living things—a celebration of the way that we as humans, alongside plants, animals, and insects, are all just moving across this land through time: beautiful, ephemeral, and equally entitled to be here."
The poem and a full program note are available to read here. Urge marks a reunion for Snider, Smith, and Liverman, following Everything That Ever Was, a duet with Renée Fleming written for Liverman's 2024 album Show Me The Way. Urge is also the third orchestral piece to join Sarah Kirkland Snider's catalog this year, following Marmoris and Iris. Her first orchestral album Forward Into Light was released by Nonesuch in February, and her first opera Hildegard recently premiered to sold out audiences and critical acclaim in Los Angeles, New York, and at the Aspen Music Festival and School.
