At the Edge of Night is a program of superb contemporary vocal and instrumental works by Jon Pescevich. Pescevich has a personal voice that makes...

At the Edge of Night is a program of superb contemporary vocal and instrumental works by Jon Pescevich. Pescevich has a personal voice that makes this music especially appealing. When composing an opera, Jon Pescevich creates tonal material to match the literary themes and characters of the drama he is setting. In his first opera, Hamlet & Ophelia (2014), the composer gave resonance to the themes of existence and transcendence, thoughtfulness and empathy. The tonal language he developed to reflect these literary themes is revisited and further explored in all of the chamber music introduced on this release. Ophelia (2017) is a set of three airs for solo violin, based on the opera Hamlet & Ophelia. The airs incorporate some of the most beautiful melodies from Hamlet & Ophelia and transform them by presenting their material within an entirely new abstract structure. American Transcendental (2012) is a cycle of four songs, based on poems by Poe, Emerson and Dickinson. Wie ein Bogenstrich (2014) is a work for violin, voice and piano, based on three poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rather than setting the poems as free-standing songs, the composer has woven them together into a through-composed work that tells a story. If music is sound searching for its significance, and if poetry is language searching for its freedom, then this album shows music and language finding and completing each other again and again in a tapestry of variations.