As a belated Valentine’s treat, a new album has dropped featuring the love songs of Philadelphia composer Romeo Cascarino.
“Pathways of Love” is collection of eight songs on texts by Sara Teasdale, Eugene Field, Robert Frost, and others. Incredibly, Cascarino, who lived from 1922 to 2002, composed all but one of the songs at the age of 16, adding “Little Blue Pigeon,” during his courtship of soprano Dolores Ferraro. Like a latter-day Mendelssohn, he manages to replicate in the newer material the tone of his more precocious utterances.
The couple recorded the songs in their original versions for voice and piano on an Orion LP. The songs were then orchestrated as a set under their unifying title.
Rounding out the new release is Cascarino’s string arrangement of “Danny Boy,” undertaken as a birthday gift for Ferraro, by then long his wife.
The soprano on the new recording is Jessica Beebe, certainly no stranger to Princeton or Philadelphia audiences – although her career has taken her all over the United States, as a soloist, recitalist, and chorister. Aside from her work in opera and oratorio, she’s a member of the Grammy-winning ensemble The Crossing, the Grammy-nominated Clarion Society, and the Grammy-nominated Seraphic Fire.
The conductor is Timothy McDonnell, a Cascarino student.
The recording will be made available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, etc. For now, enjoy it on YouTube.
If you like what you hear, don’t forget this lovely album of Cascarino’s orchestral works, conducted by JoAnn Falletta.