PRISM Quartet to Release 'Mending Wall' Album With Arturo O'Farrill And Soprano Tony Arnold

The intrepid PRISM Quartet, now in its 39th anniversary season, announces the December 1st release of its newest album, MENDING WALL, on XAS Records. 

In February 2022, PRISM was joined by soprano Tony Arnold and pianist Arturo O'Farrill in world premiere performances of Mending Wall, a fully staged concert exploring the meaning of walls in our world by giving musical form to questions about identity, community, division, and freedom.

As directed by the Dutch opera director Jorinde Keesmaat (pictured below), the event was called "brilliant" and "uncanny" and "authentically different" by Annie Levin in Observer. 

In this recording, Arnold and O'Farrill rejoin PRISM in a studio recording of the project, performing commissions by four visionary composers—Martin Bresnick, George Lewis, Juri Seo, and O'Farrill—who take inspiration from poetry by Robert Frost, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Waly Salomão, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Jorinde Keesmaat, who directed the the premiere stage production of Mending Wall in 2022, states that she was interested in “exploring the paradox of personal contact: our simultaneous discomfort with strangers and our intrinsic longing for human connection, the psychological effects of isolation and our basic need for one another's warmth. Mending Wall examines the complicated meaning of boundaries—physical and invisible—but it's also about fear giving way to hope.” 

About the Music

Arturo O'Farrill's Something to declare? (yeah, f your wall) is based on “Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future” by Guillermo Gomez-Peña and son jarocho, a Mexican song form with a lead trovador voice supported by jaranas (guitar-like instruments), which PRISM's saxophones approximate. His piece draws upon the rich political/cultural underpinnings of Fandango Fronterizo, an annual festival on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border fence.

Martin Bresnick's commission, Mending Time, is inspired by the contradictions in Robert Frost's poem “Mending Wall,” in which two neighbors meet yearly to rebuild the structure separating their farms. Bresnick writes, “According to Frost we are trapped and doomed by fences to eternal contact and inevitable alienation. But what if the walls between us were made of music?”
 
In Where Her Eye Sits, George Lewis set texts examining the legacy of Apartheid by the late South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile. The piece joins PRISM and soprano Tony Arnold “to link a coloratura's sonic sensibility with the saxophone's evocation of South African popular music via mbube-like orchestration.”

Juri Seo's work, Unsung Lullaby, is inspired by Algaravi: Echo Chamber, a volume of poetry by Syrian-Brazilian writer Waly Salomão that explores the dual meaning of “echo chamber”— the figurative connotation that's ubiquitous in our politics/media, and its older (and literal) meaning, a walled space that repeats, amplifies, and distorts sounds.