Philadelphia Portraits: A Spiritual Journey, by Cynthia Folio
Winner of the 2024 National Flute Association’s Newly Published Music Award
This work for solo piccolo and piano has become a staple of the literature. The notes presented here are from the personal blog of Lois Bliss Herbine. Starting January 2024 they are offered with the sheet music from Alry.
Five Portraits of five historically famous Philadelphians in music and in performance notes and personal memories. Click on the program notes below the photos for for the backstory of each movement or use the dropdown menu. Listen via Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music of the premiere recording on Cynthia Folio’s Inverno Azul CD by Lois Herbine or visit Piccolois Youtube channel for live video for the Coltrane, Anderson and Ross Portraits.
The first was a 2014 CD entitled Inverno Azul (that’s Blue Winter) written by Temple University flutist and composer Cynthia Folio…A high point of the disc is Philadelphia Portraits: A Spiritual Journey, a five-movement work commissioned by Herbine for piccolo and piano. Each movement touches, musically, on the essence of five renowned Philadelphians—composer Vincent Persichetti, jazz great John Coltrane, the singer and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson, inventor/statesman Benjamin Franklin, and the nation’s best-known seamstress, Betsy Ross. Folio’s miniatures nail the essential character of their subjects to a remarkable degree and Herbine’s robustly expressive and subtly colored performance seals the deal.”
Andrew Quint, Philadelphia Musical Fund Society, Jan 5th, 2016
Vincent Persichetti
John Coltrane
Marian Anderson
Benjamin Franklin
Betsy Ross
