Peter Child: Reviews: Songs of Bidpai Composed 2002. Excerpted from (The Boston Globe, October 7, 2002)
Peter Child's "Songs of Bidpai," here receiving its first - and, after intermission, second - performances, palpably enjoyed the more spacious air that composers breathe today. Child has fashioned here some half-dozen unpredictably beautiful objects, each abstractly satisfying in itself, quite independently of the "welter of fantastic, harrowing images and moods" (Child's words) that poet Muhammad al-Faituri provides him with - though these were hardly the worse off for the full-throated advocacy that soprano Lucy Shelton brought to them.
|