RSP-17 | Rick Sowash: Full Circle

Description

“Full Circle” is dedicated to clarinetist and Sowash’s friend Kirk Kassner, who had begun pressing him a few years ago to write something deeply serious that he could play and share. Taking up the challenge, Sowash wrote a five-movement clarinet sonata. “As I finished it,” Sowash wrote, “I sent it to him, and he loved it. He began practicing it, but became unwell, and before he was able to perform it, his health sank rather quickly. Only two or three months after his diagnosis, he was gone, and had not had the chance to premiere” what Sowash decided to call the “Kassner” Sonata.

The album also includes tributes to some of Sowash’s favorite composers, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Rodgers, and Gerald Finzi, as well as the title track, Full Circle, a suite that expands and rescores eight art songs Sowash had written fifty years earlier.