A collaboration between a composer and an author/poet can take many forms and involve varying degrees of artistic connection. However, when the subject matter of a very successful collaboration flows from a personally experienced tragedy, it is assumed that those connections have come from a place deep inside each person, and produced a work that is a unique entity different than the sum of its parts.
Sanctuary Walls, a work for two voices and orchestra by Forrest Wentzel based on poems by Brian Griffin, is just such a creation. Receiving an unofficial premiere with a piano reduction score on Tuesday evening, October 17, 2023, in the University of Tennessee College of Music’s Sandra G. Powell Recital Hall, Sanctuary Walls is Wentzel’s atmospheric scoring of a selection of eleven poems from a larger collection of poetry by Griffin. The collection of poetry, titled Single Lens Reflex, will be published by Iris Press in Spring of 2024. That collection is Griffin’s process of discovery—his witnessed personal reaction and reflection on the tragedy of the attack by a gunman at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in 2008.
Wentzel had the help of two vocalists that are quite familiar to Knoxville audiences, mezzo-soprano Karen Nickell and bass Andrew Wentzel. Their performance revealed an emotional drama and depth that came not just from their long career experience of bringing vocal roles to life, but from their important personal roles of being the composer’s parents.
As one might expect, the piano reduction of Wentzel’s score, carefully and sensitively sculpted here by pianist Julia Haas, could only suggest and abbreviate the deep emotional underpinnings, descriptive rhythms and textures, and the complex tonal atmosphere that clearly await listeners to the full orchestral version.
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