| Contemporary music |
Song of the Sky: Jeremy Beck Charts Three Decades of American Orchestral Storytelling
Few single albums manage to feel like a career retrospective and a fresh statement at the same time, but Song of the Sky, Jeremy Beck’s release on Neuma Records, pulls off exactly that trick. Spanning works composed thirty years apart, from a 1992 opera noir to a 2022 concert piece for harp and orchestra, the album traces a consistent voice across a genuinely wide range of settings: solo concerto, tone poem, and operatic scene. What emerges isn’t a survey so much as a portrait of a composer who has spent decades refining the same essential gift, for melody that carries real dramatic weight, in whatever form the occasion demands.
Born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1960, Beck trained at Mannes College of Music, Duke University, and ultimately earned his doctorate at Yale, and he has spent the decades since building a catalog that resists easy categorization by style or scene. Now based in Louisville, Kentucky, his music has been taken up by an unusually broad range of institutions, New York City Opera, the American Composers Orchestra, San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Yale Opera among them, and he has picked up honors along the way that speak to his range as much as his craft, including a first-prize win in the King’s Singers New Music Prize in 2021 and, more recently, a 2026 residency at Copland House. Critics have consistently reached for the same word when describing his sound: original, but never at the expense of clarity. As Gramophone’s Donald Rosenberg has put it, Beck “knows the importance of embracing the past while also going his own way”, a description that Song of the Sky, with its mix of a traditional concerto form, a Vaughan Williams-inspired rhapsody, and unabashedly theatrical opera excerpts, bears out track by track.
The album opens with its most substantial single work, the four-movement Cello Concerto, composed in 2020 during the depths of COVID-19 lockdown. It would have been easy for a piece written under those circumstances to sound anxious or fragmented; Beck’s Concerto does neither. Instead, across roughly twenty-two minutes, it unfolds with real structural confidence, a searching, unhurried opening movement giving way to a genuinely playful second movement, a more relaxed third, and a closing movement that moves between deliberateness and open longing. Bulgarian cellist Atanas Krastev, joined by the Sofia Session Orchestra under Grigor Palikarov, gives the solo line exactly what it needs: a singing tone that never sacrifices the virtuosic passages’ bite. It’s a concerto that trusts its own melodic material enough to let it develop patiently, which makes its emotional payoffs land harder when they arrive.
The Rhapsody for violin and orchestra that follows takes its inspiration, by Beck’s own acknowledgment, from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, a lineage that’s audible in its soaring, lyrical violin writing and its patient sense of unfolding. First premiered in Lviv, Ukraine, before receiving its American premiere with the Louisville Orchestra, this recording marks the piece’s first appearance on disc, with violinist Dora Dimitrova bringing a warm, singing tone to its long melodic lines. Where the Cello Concerto builds through contrasting movements, the single-movement Rhapsody works more like a sustained breath, one continuous arc of yearning that never quite resolves into simple triumph, closer in spirit to elegy than to showpiece.
The album’s emotional centre of gravity shifts sharply with five excerpts from The Highway, Beck’s 1992 opera noir, and it’s here that Song of the Sky reveals a side of his writing that the concertos only hint at. First performed at Yale University and later included in New York City Opera’s VOX series, The Highway tells a contemporary story of a young musician struggling to build an artistic life against an indifferent, often violent world; its unflinching subject matter, murder, suicide, sex trafficking, layered time structures, has kept it largely off the mainstage since. Hearing these excerpts on record, rather than as isolated concert selections, makes a strong case for the piece’s theatrical power. Sopranos Emily Albrink and tenor Robert Frankenberry and baritone Chad Sloan navigate the excerpts’ shifting, often duplicitous character relationships with real dramatic commitment, while Seth Thomas’s electric guitar threads a grittier, more contemporary texture through the orchestral writing, a choice that immediately signals this is not the same sound world as the concertos around it. The final excerpt included here pulls back from the darkness with a lighter, more ironic touch, and Albrink’s performance of it, deft, quick-witted, unmistakably theatrical, makes for a welcome tonal reset before the album’s closing work.
The album closes with its title piece, a one-movement concert work for harp and orchestra composed in 2022 and dedicated to soloist Denitza Dimitrova. Its title and inspiration come from an unusual source for concert music: a series of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, one of which graces the album’s cover. Rather than illustrating the photographs literally, Beck lets the piece drift through a sequence of varied episodes that echo the shifting moods and atmospheres of Stieglitz’s images, cloud studies that are at once documentary and deeply abstract. Dimitrova’s harp writing is the clear star here, and Beck gives her an idiom that plays to the instrument’s strengths: shimmering, resonant, capable of both delicacy and surprising weight. As a closing statement, it pulls the album’s earlier threads, the Concerto’s patience, the Rhapsody’s lyricism, into a single arc that ends the record on a note of unresolved, open-sky wonder rather than a tidy finish.
What makes Song of the Sky such a satisfying listen start to finish is how legible Beck’s musical personality remains across such different assignments. Whether he’s writing a showcase concerto, an homage to an English pastoral tradition, a noir opera scene, or a photograph-inspired tone poem, the same qualities recur: clear formal thinking, genuine melodic generosity, and a willingness to let drama emerge from within tonal language rather than by abandoning it. Recorded across sessions in both the United States and Europe, the album stands as compelling evidence of exactly what critics have long said about Beck, that he remains, three decades into this particular career arc, an original and vital voice working confidently within a tradition rather than against one.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 20th, 2026
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Tracklisting:
- Cello Concerto: With determination; Slower, pensive 07:29
- Cello Concerto: Playful 04:07
- Cello Concerto: Relaxed 05:07
- Cello Concerto: Deliberate; With longing 06:25
- Rhapsody 06:56
- The Highway: Prelude 01:37
- The Highway: Scene 1 – The Highway on the Left – “Get the Hell Back!” 07:11
- The Highway: Scene 2 – The Highway on the Right – “The World is a Strange Place” 03:03
- The Highway: Scene 2 – The Highway on the Right – “This is Not the Night” 03:05
- The Highway: Scene 3 – The Highway in the Middle – “You Gotta Have a Hook” 01:58
- Song of the Sky 12:30
More info about the Tracks:
1.Cello Concerto (2020)
- With determination; Slower, pensive 7:29
- Playful 4:07
- Relaxed 5:07
- Deliberate; With longing 6:25
Atanas Krastev, cello
Sofia Session Orchestra
Grigor Palikarov, conductor
5.Rhapsody (2016) 6:56
for violin and orchestra
Dora Dimitrova, violin
Sofia Session Orchestra
Grigor Palikarov, conductor
6.The Highway (1992), an opera noir (excerpts)
- Prelude 1:37
- Scene 1 – The Highway on the Left 7:12
- Scene 2 – The Highway on the Right 3:03
- Scene 2 – The Highway on the Right 3:05
- Scene 3 – The Highway in the Middle 1:59
Emily Albrink, soprano
Robert Frankenberry, tenor
Chad Sloan, baritone
Sofia Session Orchestra
Lyubomir Denev, Jr., conductor
with Seth Thomas, electric guitar
11.Song of the Sky (2022) 12:30
for harp and orchestra
Denitza Dimitrova, harp
Sofia Session Orchestra
Lyubomir Denev, Jr., conductor
Total Time: 59:33
NEUMA Records – CD Neuma 215
