Recently, music director Carl St. Clair led the Pacific Symphony’s world premiere of Laura Karpman’s new multimedia work Siren Songs. Timothy Mangan of The Orange County Register attended and wrote afterward: “Laura Karpman’s Siren Songs turned out to be a kind of song cycle for orchestra. The three movements were inspired by three poems by Amy Gerstler (a poet who teaches at UC Irvine), but the poems are not sung. Instead, the words of the poems, which are flashed upon t
he screen, supply the rhythms and melodies for various instruments in the ensemble… Her score clangs and surges and looms and splashes. There are dark colors and long lines and eerie sounds from conch shells and lots of percussion. The strongest impression it left with me after one hearing is that the composer has got some real chops.” Read the complete review here.