A co-commission with The Minnesota Commissioning Club had its premiere at a Schubert Club event in St Paul in March 2016. A sonata for clarinet and piano by Abbie Betinis was performed by Michael Collins, Clarinet, accompanied by Michael McHale. A Northwest premiere was performed at the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival on August 16th of the same year.
As David Evan Thomas writes, Abbie’s Rhapsodos "is a voyage of melodies and textures that will quickly find a place in the recital repertoire, for it’s expressive, dramatic and playable."
View the European premier at Wigmore Hall on Feb 9, 2019 here.
During a rehearsal prior to the Orcas event.
Betinis describes the work in more detail here:
This new rhapsody is inspired by the performers of Greek epic poetry in the 4th and 5th centuries BC. The word rhapsody comes from the Greek word meaning “to sew songs together,” and the rhapsodist (or, in Greek, rhapsodos) was like a singing storyteller, standing with a long staff in front of an eager crowd, and performing memorized snippets of stories from the great epic poets, one after the next, telling long, varied tales of adventure. Some rhapsodists became quite famous, traveling many miles to sing night after night.
The rhapsodists took their rhythm from epic poetry’s dactylic hexameter (strong weak weak, strong weak weak), and, for their melodies, exaggerated the original Greek accents in the language into a kind of speech-driven music. As I researched the strict performance practice, I wondered if the musical essence of those ancient tales would still delight our contemporary ears, even with the words themselves stripped away.
Using fragments from Homer’s The Odyssey, I let the original Greek verse suggest both the rhythmic accents and melodic contour of the clarinet part (in fact, if you know the opening lines of the epic poem in Greek you could theoretically be able to sing along). The piano paints the context and emotion of the stories: the shifting sea, Penelope’s loom, memories of home.
Like all epic poems, the performance opens with an invocation to the muse, then the stories begin. You might hear Odysseus dodging arrows, calling back to his dying comrades, the thick glissandi of the lotus eaters, or the shriek of the Cyclops while Odysseus escapes. Whatever the music suggests to you, I hope it takes you on an adventure, and that it might somehow connect us to those who — like us — sat together listening to master storytellers ‘sewing songs together’ thousands of years ago.
I am indebted to Michael Collins and Michael McHale for taking up (and indeed inspiring) this piece, as well as Barry Kempton at The Schubert Club for facilitating this commission from The Minnesota Commissioning Club and Seattle Commissioning Club.