David Serkin Ludwig and Katie Ford’s The Anchoress, released on August 28

The Anchoress is a project that has been a labor of love for the past 3 years. It has involved a collaboration between the PRISM Quartet, Piffaro, and the wonderful soprano Hyunah Yu to bring to life a stunningly beautiful work, The Anchoress, by David Serkin Ludwig and poet Katie Ford. The brilliant flutist Mimi Stillman and I performed a related duet by David titled Three Anchoress Songs to round out the album.  Since I also served as executive producer, and edited, mixed, and mastered the album, I’ve heard this recording a great many times, and have become more deeply mesmerized by the music with each new listening.

You can check out The Anchoress press release HERE, and the short description is below.

Soprano Hyunah Yu, the PRISM Quartet, and Piffaro, The Renaissance Band present a one-woman monodrama by composer David Serkin Ludwig and poet Katie Ford that explores struggles with faith, alienation, gender, and social power through the imagined person of an anchoress, a medieval mystic who spent her life confined to a cell attached to a church. In her liner notes, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim describes the anchoress as “a paradoxical figure: Buried alive, she is sought out for her wisdom. Encased in perpetual darkness, she is considered clairvoyant. Dead to the world, she becomes a pillar of her community.” The album includes Three Anchoress Songs, a companion piece performed by flutist Mimi Stillman and saxophonist Matthew Levy in which Ludwig imagines music the anchoress heard wafting into her cell from the outside world.