Duration: 9’00”
For a live recording, click here
to go to soundcloud.
First three
score pages (pdf)
Moonlight Rhapsody is intended to be a companion piece for Charles
Martin Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for oboe, viola, and piano. The
piece is based on the first of the two poems set by Loeffler, “L’Étang”
(The Pond) by Maurice Rollinat.
Teeming with ancient fish, long sightless,
The pond, beneath a low sky mumbling muffled thunder,
Laps about the centuries-old reeds,
Spreading its dread opacity.
Down there, elves are the lights
For more than one dark marsh, sinister and feared.
But the pond makes itself known in this desolation
Only by the ugly sounds of consumptive toads.
Here, the moon just appearing
Seems so fantastically to mirror herself
That to see her ghost-like face,
Her flattened nose, her strange teeth,
One would think a death’s head, lit from within,
Might have come to observe itself in a murky mirror.
Contact the composer directly to inquire about score/parts: mikedambrosio@gmail.com