Any of Those Decembers

Blending vocal and orchestral elements across several movements, cantatas are notoriously difficult to compose. Benjamin Perry Wenzelberg has accepted the challenge with ANY OF THOSE DECEMBERS, setting poems by Jeanne Minahan to music. The result is intimate, aesthetic, and wistful — a tender embrace of lyrics and sound.

Scored for four solo singers with varying accompaniments, ANY OF THOSE DECEMBERS impresses on multiple fronts. But it isn’t due to the excellent source material alone: the master performers in Lyric Fest bring both the lyrics and the composition to life. A wonderful collaboration, in which the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts, Wenzelberg’s work is “a cantata to make memories sing.”