One Sweet Morning is a four-movement song cycle for mezzo-soprano solo and orchestra by the American composer John Corigliano.
So many in the audience of this piece will have images of the frightful day itself—jet liners crashing into the World Trade Center, people jumping to their deaths from the top of the buildings, and the final collapse of the towers themselves—burned into their retinas.
The fourth and final movement is set to the eponymous anti-war poem "One Sweet Morning" by the American lyricist and poet E. Y.
Reviewing the world premiere, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote:With a viscerally emotional score One Sweet Morning shifts in mood from ruminative to bellicose, from mystical to wrenching.
[6]Rob Cowan of Gramophone called it an "imposing song-cycle" and observed, "Writing it must have proved a challenging and in some respects unenviable task, given the need to balance the inevitable emotional imperative with a sense of distance necessary if durable art is going to be the outcome, which I think, in this case, it is."
He added:The trans-national texts used are by Czesław Miłosz, Homer, Li Po and EY Harburg, and the orchestral style ranges from sublime simplicity to the harrowing sounds of battle (in the Patroclus excerpt from Homer's Iliad) where post-Bergian resonances underline vivid parallels (and I mean this in the best sense) between Corigliano and the finest American film composers, for example Leonard Rosenman.
Mezzo Stephanie Blythe’s performance of the premiere is strong and sonorous, while Alan Gilbert conducts a compelling account of Corigliano's multifaceted score.
[7] Martin Bernheimer of the Financial Times, however, gave the piece a more mixed response, remarking:Contrary to possible expectation, Corigliano wraps the diverse sentiments in compact orchestral fabrics, favouring dissonance over harmonic clarity, meandering Sprechgesang over melodic stability.