Recorded Works
Joseph James: Sketches from The Scarlet Letter
The Philharmonia; conductor Andrew Greenwood; chorus master and project coordinator John Gibbons
Vivian Tierney – Hester Prynne; David Maxwell Anderson – Arthur Dimmesdale
Track listing
1. The Prison Door
2. The Interview
3. Pearl
4. The Governor's Hall
5. The Elf-Child and the Minister
6. The Leech and his Patient
7. The Meteor
8. A Forest Walk
9. A Flood of Sunshine
10. Chorus: Adorn thyself with me!
11. Conclusion: Be true!
The opera's libretto closely follows Hawthorne's romance of 1850. Set in the then small town of Boston, Massachusetts in 1642, it tells of Hester Prynne, her lover Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, their love-child Pearl, and the revenge of Hester's aged scholar-husband Roger Chillingworth.
The Sketches are drawn in sequence from the opera itself, of which they are intended to provide a shortened account. Its final scene, concerning the Revelation of the Scarlet Letter, has not been incorporated into the present suite; the work concludes, however, with the closing measures of the opera and its moral: Be True! Be True! Be True! . . .
The mixture of subtle timbres is a particular feature of the music of Joseph James, and an unusual feature of the opera lies in the inclusion of 'period' and rare instruments in the context of a full-scale symphony orchestra. In Adorn thyself with me (track 10), for example, two sets of forces juxtapose opposing ideas: the first group, playing in A flat major, consists of the chorus, 12 solo strings, harpsichord, celeste, two harps, the contrabass banjo, the serpent, a flute and a bassoon, while the second group, playing a semitone higher in A major, comprises the crotales, the glass harmonica, the Irish harp, the chitarrone and the hurdy-gurdy.
First published: 1991