Featured Recording

Winner of the Washington Music Association's WAMMIE Award for Best Classical Album 2021

Birds of Love and Prey

Naxos (No: 8.579064)
February 28, 2020

"Andrew Earle Simpson’s imaginative, dexterous Birds of Love and Prey provides an extraordinary role for [soprano Deborah] Sternberg’s powerful, elegant voice. Don’t miss the cadenzas here- they’re an intellectual and aural treat."
—Stephanie Boyd, American Record Guide, May/June 2021

"Simpson’s fascinatingly varied Birds cycle takes advantage of [soprano Deborah] Sternberg’s secure vocal production and wide range..."
"Simpson selected texts from across the centuries: some anonymous, some Aristophanes (from, of course, The Birds), some Keats, some Tennyson — all very contrasting and all set with great vividness and wit."
—Ralph P. Locke, The Arts Fuse, March 9, 2021 [Full Review]

"The title work of this disk, Birds of Love and Prey, is a fascinating piece..."
"This song ["The Owl and the Nightingale"] perfectly embodies the composer’s stated intention of contrasting songbirds with birds of prey, while challenging some of the assumptions that we tend to make about them. It's a fascinating concept that Simpson brilliantly realizes." [Read More]
—Gregory Berg ("The Listener's Gallery"), Journal of Singing, January/February 2022 | Volume 78, No. 3, pp. 421–425

Soprano Deborah Sternberg brings together three song cycles themed on birds, each with its own unique flavour and expressive vocabulary. Andrew Earle Simpson’s eloquent skills as a composer and pianist are united in Birds of Love and Prey, in which both antique and modern textual sources contrast songbirds and predators in a variety of ways. Eric Kitchen uses transcriptions of actual birdsong in The Olney Avian Verse of William Cowper, while Gabriel Thibaudeau’s Cycle Avicellus portrays birds within landscapes using a language of modern impressionism.