“The Last Invocation” sets three arts on a pedestal: pianistic artistry, dramatic choral writing, and poetry. In this new work the famous poem by Walt Whitman finds a new voice. A lilting, compound meter suggests a dancing spirit, while the dynamic highs and lows of the piece explore the mysteries of mortality. Wordless chorus adds further color and a sense of wonder beyond human understanding.

With music described by the Boston Globe as “hypnotic” and “haunting and hopeful,” Mary Montgomery Koppel is a sought-after composer of choral, vocal, chamber, and orchestral works. Praised for her “luxuriant choral writing” and “myriad coloristic sonorities,” she writes in a compositional language that is both richly complex and contrapuntally refined, while remaining both aurally accessible and challenging.

MMK was a founding member and the first composer-in-residence of the Lorelei Ensemble. Since Lorelei’s founding in 2007, she has contributed nine new works to the repertoire for women’s voices, spanning eleven seasons and numerous concerts throughout the United States. Performers praise MMK for her understanding of the voice, utilizing the full capacity of the instrument in “idiomatic lines of surprising yet natural contour.” Her commissions include Dawn for Six Degree Singers, Stabat Mater Speciosa for the Harvard University Choir, and Horizons for Su Lian Tan and John McDonald, released on the album GRAND THEFT and other felonies (ARSIS Audio, 2013). In 2018 she enjoyed her Boston Symphony Hall debut when the MIT Symphony Orchestra performed her piece Kaleidoscope, and earned an Honorable Mention in Boston Choral Ensemble’s 2018 Commission Competition.

MMK is also an educator, music director, and soprano. She is an Assistant Professor at Gordon College, teaching composition, instrumentation, arranging, songwriting, and music history, and also teaches music theory at Boston University. Before moving to the Boston area in 2006, she taught at Bennington College, where she founded and conducted the Bennington College Chamber Singers. Her music direction includes work at MASSMoCA and HERE in New York. She holds a D.M.A. from the Boston University School of Music, a B.A. from Middlebury College, and a Diplôme in Composition from l’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris.

Text

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep
of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, Strong is your hold O love.)

– Walt Whitman

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