Victoria Clark - December Songs for Voice and Orchestra (2022)

You may think you know Maury Yeston's December Songs - his poignant, richly layered journey patterned after Schubert's Winterreise - but you don't. Commissioned in 1991 by Carnegie Hall in honor of it's centennial celebration, Yeston responded with a seminal work for voice and piano that reflected and honored the variety of musical worlds that had long graced the Carnegie Hall stage: from classical to cabaret, from folk to pop. Since then, December Songs has received numerous performances and been translated into a dozen languages, but it has long been Yeston's dream for these songs to gain the dimensions and power that only a full orchestra can provide. In 2022, that dream became a reality, when orchestrator Larry Hochman was commissioned to score the piece for 37 instruments, and actress and singer Victoria Clark - who had taken Broadway by storm as Alice Beane in Yeston's Tony Award-winning Titanic and who had herself been honored with a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for The Light in the Piazza - signed on to portray the wounded woman who wanders a wintry Central Park, immersed in but ultimately triumphing over her travails. Clark put herself through a four-month rehearsal period, determined to make the role her own, and to ensure that her journey was every bit as detailed and persuasive as if she were performing it on the stage. Upon it's recording in May 2022, the results proved cathartic, as songs written to be intimate were raised to the theatrical rhetoric of virtual symphonic dimensions, yet miraculously retained all their subtleties and delicacies. As Yeston remarked at the time, "Knowing these songs only with piano accompaniment, our jaws dropped as Ted Sperling gave the downbeat, the brass came in triple forte and Vicki began her journey with such stunning artistry. It transformed what had been chamber music to something so new, I could never have anticipated it." Music critic Matthew Gurewitsch hailed it as "a larger-than-life, cinematic burst of grand opera, with the stirrings of the heart a chanteuse shares with us still close up, as intimate confidences." Now PS Classics, which has had the honor of collaborating with the composer on nearly a dozen of his works (including Grammy-nominated cast albums of Nine and Death Takes a Holiday and acclaimed releases of The Maury Yeston Songbook and Maury Sings Yeston), is thrilled to unveil December Songs for Voice and Orchestra, a bold reimagining of a pioneering work that triumphantly broadens it's musical and emotional range.