WHEN THE CLIFFS WEEP Places; a collection of pictures, transformed into a tonal language. A kaleidoscope of musical sketches intended to evoke images in the listener. Images that are revealed afresh out of what is seen. A form of possibility that itself becomes the work, moves the music to a gesture of self-liberation. This transformation is audible in more or less abstract form in the "New England Suite" featured here. Places and events are commingled, sound images are created from them that remind me of Cézanne's nonfinito paintings: (spots and lines). Not everything is shown, the only aid being the listener's own imagination as a requisite constituent of true perception. The rest of the pieces take a more concrete approach, compositions melding place and music as well as two standards from the Great American Songbook that I have grown fond of. "Engiadina" features words and music by a misty-eyed native of the Engadine, longing for the home he has left and issuing a declaration on the Vereina tunnel, which brings the people of the valley, as they bow to economic progress, not only advantages. Three musicians have created sound-sketches, the fourth was the Demiurge, and the fifth has given us Eurydice. Just as the Demiurge arranges the world in Plato's "Timaeus" and lends life to the cosmos, so does our lyrical trumpeter, Michael Gassmann, have no trouble rising to this task. With his erotic playing, he arranges, designs and lends life to the landscapes and situations cast here in sound. Orpheus (Silvan Jeger), our bewitching singer, breathes the cantabile text in such a spirit of reverie and intimacy into the microphone that even the cliffs begin to weep. Tony Renold "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Henry David Thoreau, Walden "No truer American existed than Thoreau." Ralph Waldo Emerson