Yeston's December Songs Receives New PS Classics CD with Yvette Georges

By: Dec. 23, 2005
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A new recording of Maury Yeston's song cycle December Songs--with 10 tracks in French and 10 in English--will be released by PS Classics in March 2006. They will feature new interpretations of the songs by Paris-based actress/singer Yvette Georges, as well as new orchestrations.

December Songs, which composer/lyricist of Nine and Phantom based on Die Winterreise by Franz Schubert, is a collection of songs of "love lost, of the struggle to move on, and of the resilience of the human spirit," according to notes on PS Classic's website. Georges performed a well-received one-woman show of December Songs (with French translations by Boris Bergman) at Paris' Theatre du Renard in the winter of 2004-2005. The new CD will feature a color CD booklet with both French and English lyrics, as well as a new Yeston song called "Strange" and orchestrations by Larry Hochman, who worked on two December Songs that were included on PS Classic's The Maury Yeston Songbook.

Written for Carnegie Hall's centenary season and introduced by cabaret star Andrea Marcovicci at Weill Recital Hall, December Songs was previously released on a CD that featured Marcovicci's renditions of "December Snow," "Where Are You Now," "Please Let's Not Even Say Hello," "When Your Love is New," "Bookseller in the Rain," "My Grandmother's Love Letters," "I Am Longing," "I Had a Dream About You," "By the River" and "What a Relief." The song cycle was also featured on opera singer Harolyn Blackwell's 1997 CD Strange Hurt, and a 2002 ballet by Lynn Taylor Corbett had its premiere at the Carolina Ballet.

"Die Winterreise is the greatest song cycle ever written. It has a contemporaneity that never goes away, and what I hope to do is to create a modern equivalent, to paraphrase the ethos of Die Winterreise, with its ambivalence, its major/minor duality, and its natural images that are metaphors of the character's internal state," stated Yeston. In December Songs, a woman takes a stroll through Central Park to come to revelations about herself--much as a young man did through the Austrian woods in the Schubert cycle.

Georges played Kate McGowan in the French-language premiere production of Yeston's Titanic, and other musical theatre credits in France include Barnum, Le Pass Muraille, Nymph Errant and Chantant sous la Pluie (Singin' in the Rain), for which she won a Moliere Award. She was the voice of Tzipporah in the animated film "The Prince of Egypt."

PS Classics is currently offering $9.95 CDs through Christmas Day. Twice Grammy-nominated (for its Broadway cast recordings of Assassins and Nine: The Musical), the label, co-founded by Tommy Krasker and Philip Chaffin, offers a diverse line of show albums, solo CDs and songbook recordings. Its cast albums celebrate Broadway (The Frogs, Fiddler on the Roof, A Year With Frog and Toad), off-Broadway (Striking 12, My Life With Albertine and Zanna, Don't!), and regional theatre (Ricky Ian Gordon's Only Heaven and Michael John LaChiusa's First Lady Suite). Its solo albums range from jazz (Jessica Molaskey: Make Believe) to folk (Rebecca Luker: Leaving Home) to pure show music (Christine Andreas: Here's to the Ladies); Marin Mazzie's and Jason Daniely's Opposite You is a recent album of duets. Composers highlighted range from Billy Strayhorn and Jerome Moross to Maury Yeston and Jason Robert Brown. PS Classics is distributed exclusively by Image Entertainment.

For more information, visit www.psclassics.com.


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