Listen to Dear Life, a musical work based on a story by Alice Munro
The National Arts Centre Orchestra recorded it with soprano Erin Wall and narrator Martha Henry
In September 2015, the National Arts Centre Orchestra and its then new music director, Alexander Shelley, opened their season with a performance of Dear Life, a work for narrator, soprano and orchestra by Zosha Di Castri, based on the semi-autobiographical short story of the same name by Alice Munro.
Before taking up his new position at the NAC Orchestra, Shelley had read Munro's Dear Life, which inspired him to commission four symphonic works from Canadian women composers, to be performed during his first concert seasons with the orchestra. Di Castri's piece was the first of these.
Writer Merilyn Simonds was tasked with distilling Munro's 10,000-word story about her childhood into a 500-word script, which was performed by narrator Martha Henry at the work's premiere.
Di Castri, who herself was a new mother when Dear Life was premiered, said Munro's story struck a chord with her: "A portrait of a mother-daughter relationship over a lifetime, an artist coming into her own, realizing her 'otherness' but also the universality of lived experience." Di Castri gave the soprano soloist fragmented text and invented sounds to sing — "a visceral response bridging the divide between the abstractness of the music and the concreteness of the spoken word."
Reviewing the premiere for Ludwig Van Toronto, Michael Vincent wrote, "The orchestration evoked the sounds of southern Ontario, including rain, wind, snow and Canadian geese."
Di Castri's Dear Life and the other three works commissioned as part of this project would be recorded and released by the NAC Orchestra in 2017 on an album titled Life Reflected.
Listen to Dear Life, below.