Peter Boyer - Ellis Island, the Dream of America

Information

Composer: Peter Boyer

• Ellis Island, the Dream of America

Barry Bostwick; Blair Brown; Olympia Dukakis

Anne Jackson; Bebe Neuwirth

Eli Wallach; Louis Zorich

Philharmonia Orchestra

Peter Boyer, conductor

Date: 2005

Label: Naxos

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Review

Combining music, history, and theater, this spirited evocation of Ellis Island is a robust celebration of the American immigrant experience. It comes at a welcome time. The subtitle is “The Dream of America”; in the wake of the US government turning its back on thousands of the poorest of Hurricane Katrina’s victims, America’s ideals do indeed seem like a distant “dream”. This new work reminds us of our lost ideals.

Composer Peter Boyer, a rising star on the contemporary music scene, has woven together immigrants’ stories from the Ellis Island Oral History Project and illustrated them with Coplandesque rhetoric reminiscent of A Lincoln Portrait. Alternating patriotic bombast with lyrical effusions based on a brass fanfare, the score is colorful (especially a storm at sea and a rousing coda for “The New Colossus”, the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty), if not especially memorable or original.

Boyer is fortunate to have an all-star cast for his narrators, including Olympia Dukakis, Blair Brown, Barry Bostwick, Anne Jackson, Louis Zorich, Eli Wallach, and Bebe Neuwirth. They perform with spirit and conviction, as does the Philharmonia under the composer. The sound is big and forward—appropriate for the music and its overtly public gestures.

— American Record Guide

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Peter Boyer (born 10 February 1970) is an American composer and conductor. Educated at Rhode Island College, The Hartt School, USC Thornton School of Music, and through private study with John Corigliano, Boyer is among the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of his generation. His works have received hundreds of performances worldwide, including the GRAMMY-nominated Ellis Island: The Dream of America. Boyer has received major commissions from leading U.S. institutions, contributed to numerous film scores, and holds a professorship at Claremont Graduate University.

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