SKU: A0.495360

The Girl From Ipanema (Girl from Ipanema) is a Brazilian song from Bossa Nova. It was composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim and written by Vinicius de Moraes in 1962. A 1964 version, recorded by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz in the United States, became an international success. This is present on the Getz/Gilberto album, which also included songs by João Gilberto. In the United States, the single reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining for two weeks, and in the United Kingdom it reached number 29. Ipanema is a beachfront neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil. The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helo Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl who lived on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Every day, she passed the bar-café Veloso on her way to the beach.

SKU: A0.495361

The Girl From Ipanema (Girl from Ipanema) is a Brazilian song from Bossa Nova. It was composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim and written by Vinicius de Moraes in 1962. A 1964 version, recorded by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz in the United States, became an international success. This is present on the Getz/Gilberto album, which also included songs by João Gilberto. In the United States, the single reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining for two weeks, and in the United Kingdom it reached number 29. Ipanema is a beachfront neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil. The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helo Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl who lived on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Every day, she passed the bar-café Veloso on her way to the beach.

SKU: A0.1018898

Programme Notes:

 Icarus Also Flew takes its title from the first line of the poem Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert. He is referring to the classical myth of Daedalus and Icarus, an inventive father and son who bravely escape from their imprisonment in a tower by collecting the disposed feathers of seabirds, then fashion wings out of them and fly away. While the story is often treated as a morality tale--listen to your elders, don’t get cocky like the young man, Icarus, who, in such an understandable state of elation, ascended too close to the sun thus causing the wings to melt and his tumbling to his Mediterranean death--what Jack Gilbert reminds us is how regardless of one’s failure, the sheer transcendental experience of mortal flight remains glorious and unforgettable. Icarus’s fall was not into a legacy of disdain and oblivion, but in truth, he had come to the end of his triumph.

 This piece was the first of a series I composed during the Covid-19 quarantine conditions of 2020, to serve as potential contemporary preludes for each of Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies--his two hundred and fiftieth anniversary was this year!--though they can all stand on their own on any program. The connection, in this case, is with his celebrated fifth symphony in C minor--the Fate symphony, as it is commonly known. I’ll let the listener find their own connections.

About the Composer:

Benjamin Sajo (b. 1988) is a Canadian composer of contemporary classical music, as well as an educator. Since developing a fiercely independent creative voice upon the completion of his studies at Western (2010) and McGill Universities (2013), he continues to find inspiration from the intersection of mythology, art, and nature upon the contemporary human experience. In 2019, he released his premiere album of original music, The Great War Sextet: Canadian War Poetry with Trombone & Strings, with support from the Ontario Arts Council. He is a member of SOCAN and the League of Canadian Composers.