On the morning of 9/11 from his Greenwich Village apartment, David Del Tredici could hear the sirens — and their unsettling sound opens his newest work “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Patriotism may have led Del Tredici to the famous Longfellow poem (“Listen my children and you shall hear…”), but his grand and colorful setting for soprano, chorus and orchestra is more fantasy than jingoism. It receives a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat performance by Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with soprano Hila Plitmann (Telarc). The new disc also includes “The Here and Now,” a setting of poems of the great gay Sufi mystic Rumi composed by Christopher Theofanidis, plus the “Lamentation” from Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah.”
A version of this story originally appeared in The Advocate.
