Track of the Month: July

WORKS BY DAVID L. POST, "An original American voice." — Lukas Foss

The piece you hear is Fantasia on a Virtual Chorale, a TMF commission by contemporary American composer David L. Post, performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet. It is inspired, Post says, by "the wonderful, haunting Meditation on the Old Czech Chorale 'Saint Wenceslas' of Josef Suk,  . . .  a signature piece and a well-loved symbol of unity and comfort for the Czech people during wartime." (Pavel Haas also took inspiration from Suk's Chorale for his String Quartet No. 3, written in response to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and among the last pieces he composed before his transport to Terezin.)

David Post describes this work: "Well before any point of arrival is reached, the listener is confronted with swirling bits and pieces, motives and intervals that are part of the chorale but which collide and ricochet off each other, at times seeming to land and form a well-behaved cadence, but remain unsettled until the very end, when the fragments coalesce and the chorale finally emerges. But its appearance is cut short abruptly, and before it can establish itself completely it begins to disintegrate and soon vanishes into silence."
The Fantasia is available on this CD from TMF.
​Call us at 857-222-8263 if you'd like a copy. $10.

Listen to more music by David Post:

String Quartet No. 2 is performed here by the Hawthorne String Quartet, recorded live at the Spanish Hall of Prague Castle in 2002 at a benefit concert organized by TMF Director Mark Ludwig for relief after  tragic floods  devastated Prague and the Czech countryside.  Here are two lively movements:

​The entire concert at Prague Castle is available on the TMF CD "Concert for Terezin," and includes music by David Post, Josef Suk, Hans Krasa, Gideon Klein, and Viktor Ullmann. Please call us at 857-222-8263 if you'd like a copy. $10.
Here is David Post's String Quartet No. 3, performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet.
Here is the third movement from Post's String Quartet No. 4, "Three photographs of Abelardo Morel" (2005), performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet. The image that inspired this movement is  Morel's "Map in Sink," below.
"I found the prospect of using visual images as a springboard for musical composition exciting. To sweeten the pot, Abe's images were immediately compelling and congenial. His work is dynamic and forceful, with unusual, startling juxtapositions, and often show familiar objects in novel and unfamiliar ways, so the viewer isn't able to identify them immediately. The images reveal themselves over time, much in the same say as music unfolds over time. I found the process of being drawn into his re-imagined world to be very conducive to producing musical ideas.
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"We selected three photographs and I wrote a brief movement for each, pieces that could stand alone, but also be heard together as a coherent whole. My intent was not to 'translate' the visual image into sound — an impossible task at best — but rather to capture a state of feeling that it evoked, as well as write a piece that could be heard without any specific reference to the photographs. The result is the three brief movements of the Fourth Quartet."

—David L. Post

Happy 70th Birthday,
DAVID POST!

with thanks for your outstanding additions to TMF's commissions honoring the Terezín artists
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At the Lennon Wall in Prague. Photo by Michael J. Lutch
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David Post, third from left, at the premiere of "The Day of Light," at Prague's Spanish Synagogue. With Mark Ludwig and TMF commission composers Sivan Eldar and Elaine Agnew
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David L. Post was born in New York City and holds degrees from the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, and Brandeis University. He started musical training early, studying ‘cello with Samuel Reiner and Charles Forbes and composition with Charles Whittenberg and later with Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago. He pursued further study with Larry Bell and Lukas Foss.

For several years, he was a participant in the Chamber Music Conference and Composers Forum of the East at Bennington College. He is a consultant and contributing music editor for Dover Publications and is also a practicing clinical psychologist.

Recent honors have included several ASCAP awards and a First Prize in the New England Reed Trio Composition Competition. His music has received wide exposure on WGBH radio in Boston and WNYC in New York City, and his Fourth String Quartet was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in music. His orchestral and chamber works have been played and recorded by international organizations including the Czech Radio Symphony orchestra, the Moravian Philharmonic, and Salem Philharmonic, among others.

Writing in Fanfare magazine, William Zagorski termed his English Horn Concerto “A tonal and unabashedly lyrical concerto, resulting in a piece that is able to stand beside Richard Strauss’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s essays for oboe and orchestra.” Zagorski termed his First Quartet “a fine work—rigorously constructed and free of gratuitous effects. Here he takes the listener into the realm of intensely human communication.”

He has received numerous commissions from groups and individuals including the Aiolos Collective, an international group of wind players; the Terezin Music Foundation; and the Martinu Quartet, which premiered his Second String Quartet at the Prague Contemporary Music Festival in April 2002. That work and others have been championed and recorded by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Hawthorne String Quartet on the Naxos label.

His Variations and Fugue on a Bach-Busoni Chorale was premiered to critical acclaim by noted pianist Simone Dinnerstein in March 2007 at the Philadelphia Bach Festival. His Piano Quintet was premiered by Ms. Dinnerstein and the Hawthorne String Quartet in March, 2008. Recently, his Fantasia on a Virtual Chorale was premiered in its string orchestra version by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“The Day of Light,” a choral commission from the Terezin Music Foundation, was taken up by the acclaimed Boston Children’s Chorus for their 2015 European Tour and received its U.S. premiere at Symphony Hall in October 2015.

David Post’s scores are published by Editions Bim, Switzerland and MMB Music, St. Louis, MO. Naxos Records, MMC Recordings, Turquoise Bee Productions, and West Virginia University Sound Recordings, Inc. produce his commercial CDs.

His first novel, Nothing to See Here, was published in 2007.

Also see: www.davidpostmusic.com