Archangel Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

Brooklyn-born Michael Shapiro (b. 1951) assembles a suite of his compositions, of which the Archangel Concerto occupies pride of place. The piece, set in two mvmts, conforms to aspects of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, respectively the Pandemonim in Heaven, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise after the fall to the Serpent’s temptation.

Perlimplinito, Opera Sweet offers the entr’acte music in four scenes from Shapiro’s first opera, based on a play by the Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca. A love-story allegory, the tale involves an old man’s marriage to a young woman who betrays him on their wedding night, with five men of different races.

Roller Coaster is a piece of five minutes’ duration, a wild ride that embodies the Coney Island Cyclone in Brooklyn, NY. The amusement park ride becomes metaphor for the whirlwind ups and downs of life experience.

Widorama! takes its cue from French composer Charles-Marie Widor’s Toccata from his Fifth Organ Symphony, here for full symphony orchestra, in the manner of the Leopold Stokowski arrangements of Bach’s organ music that Stokowski popularized throughout his career. The piece exploits – what Shapiro calls “a game of registers” - diverse masses of musical textures while incorporating the many timbres of orchestral instruments.