Doug Balliet - Ovid Cantatas

[JSngry]

Does anybody know of a commercially available recording of this? It's on Qwest Classical as a video, but that seems to be it. There's some harmonic stuff going on there that I would like to check out more granularly, but with no record, that will be hard.

 

It's Doud Balliet with Les Arts Florrisants. Any meaningful direction here would be much appreciated!

[T.D.]

I couldn't find anything, but you've no doubt already done the same googling...

I was interested to see that the work dates back to at least 2013, when (at least part of) it was performed in NYC:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/arts/music/new-vintage-baroque-gives-modern-twists-to-dianas-legend.html

 

Could the composer (who spells his surname with 2 "t" s), against all odds, be related to the late jazz scribe Whitney Balliett?

Edited March 5, 2022 by T.D.

[JSngry]

Qwest TV (and they've got three channels!) is a pain in the butt with it's commercial interruptions, some worse than other, so I could tell that it was not brand-new. But I really would have expected there to have been some kind of a recording by now. Indie-classical can get really wonky about who gets released by whom, and this is a pretty wonky piece, and in a very provocative way, imo. At leas5t after this one hearing. Not so much the "rap cantata" element nearly as much as the instrumental composing, which caught me ear repeatedly.

There should be a record.

[T.D.]

My speculation is, FWIW (which is to say zero):

Perhaps the composer is hoping for the piece to be recorded by Les Arts Florissants, for whom it was written. Understandable, since they're a deservedly renowned ensemble.

But Wm. Christie and LAF seem to record for Harmonia Mundi, and a rap cantata doesn't strike me as a HM-like work. So it'd be a record company issue. 

Repeating FWIW.

[JSngry]

There's no business like show business!