Voyages
Center for Gifted Young Musicians:
Youth Chamber Orchestra
Aaron Picht, conductor
Voyages will be available on all major streaming/download platforms on December 12, 2025. Physical CDs will be available via Bandcamp.
The Youth Chamber Orchestra of Temple Music Prep’s Center for Gifted Young Musicians has participated in a cultural exchange with the Tónskóli Sigursveins D. Kristinssonar in Reykjavík, Iceland for more than a decade. Over the years, the YCO has traveled to Iceland several times, and the Icelandic students have visited Philadelphia in turn. The rich relationships developed through this exchange led to Snorri Birgisson’s composition Islands, written for and premiered by this ensemble. Islands in turn has inspired the selection of its companion pieces on this recording. Each selection evokes a distinct destination, giving rise to dreams of new voyages.
"Islands" by Snorri Birgisson (World Premiere)
Islands (Eyjar) was composed in 2020. Aaron Picht, who conducts a string orchestra called the Temple University Music Preparatory Youth Chamber Orchestra in Philadelphia, USA, asked me to compose the piece, which is dedicated to him and the ensemble. They premiered the work on May 7, 2022, at the Temple Performing Arts Center in Philadelphia. The piece consists of four movements, and its material is diverse. Among the sources are traditional vocal tunes (stemmur) that were sung on Flatey and Svefneyjar, two small islands in Breiðafjörður. These tunes were recorded in the 1960s and are preserved at the Árni Magnússon Institute, accessible via ismus.is. The sources for these recordings were Guðrún Jónína Eyjólfsdóttir (1887–1989) and Kristín Pétursdóttir (1887–1976). The composition was supported by the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, the RÚV and STEF Composers’ Fund.
–Note by Snorri Birgisson
"Oblivion" by Astor Piazzolla, arr. Aaron Picht
The Latin root of the word “Oblivion” means “a forgetting” or “to forget.” Of Piazzolla’s over one thousand compositions, Oblivion is arguably his most popular work. Written in New York City in 1982, Piazzolla’s melody is a milonga, a dance of Uruguayan and Argentinian origin which predates the tango and evokes a profound sense of nostalgia and sadness.
Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas by Astor Piazzolla arr. Leonid Desyatnikov
Piazzolla did not initially conceive the four movements of Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, otherwise known as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, as an artistic whole. Verano Porteño was created as incidental music for a play in 1965. Otoño Porteño followed in 1969 and Invierno and Primavera were both written on separate occasions in 1970. That same year, all four pieces were performed for the first time together in Buenos Aires by the Quinteto Nuevo Tango, Piazzolla’s tango ensemble which included violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass, and bandoneon. In the late 1990s, Gidon Kremer commissioned Leonid Desyatnikov to arrange Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro for solo violin and string orchestra. The result is a remarkably colorful synthesis of tango melodies and rhythms, jazz harmonies, special string effects, and a multitude of surprising, humorous references to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in each movement.
Souvenir de Florence by P. I. Tchaikovsky arr. Lucas Drew
In 1886, Tchaikovsky vowed to compose a chamber music piece in gratitude for receiving honorary membership in the St. Petersburg Chamber Music Society. One year later, he decided that his chamber music offering should be a string sextet. In 1890, Tchaikovsky traveled to Florence where he composed his opera, The Queen of Spades, in just forty-four days! Having finished what he later regarded as his greatest creative achievement, Tchaikovsky turned his energies to writing his sextet. Tchaikovsky returned to Russia, but the memories of Florence remained and became the inspiration for what turned out to be an unexpected compositional challenge. Tchaikovsky complained that it was, “terribly difficult working in this new form, it seems that rather than writing for six voices, I am composing for the orchestra, and only then arranging it for six string instruments.” Tchaikovsky finished the four-movement work in early August and heard the first reading of the sextet in December 1890. He revised the third and fourth movements, and in 1892, Leopold Auer himself gave the St. Petersburg premiere of the revised version of this much beloved work.
–Notes by Aaron Picht except for Islands (Eyjar)
