Ambassador Suite

PROGRAM NOTE

Ambassador Suite comprises four songs from The Ambassador, arranged for string orchestra and soloist. These orchestrations largely reflect the arrangements heard on the original studio recording, released by Sony Masterworks in 2014. While intended as a sequence, it is not necessary that the suite be performed in its entirety, nor that it be performed in the suggested order. In addition, the incorporation of contrasting, interstitial pieces is both acceptable and encouraged. For example, three of these arrangements were first heard interleaved with Schubert songs at a concert featuring the composer and string orchestra A Far Cry, at Jordan Hall in Boston.

The Ambassador is a study of Los Angeles seen through the lens of ten of its buildings. A thumbnail guide to the four songs included in the suite follows: "Veda" brings us to the fictional Glendale home of Mildred Pierce, in the novel and film of the same name. Following in the cinematic realm, "Bradbury" takes us, through the perspective of the anti-hero replicant Roy Batty, into the world of the 1982 film Blade Runner, a good deal of which was filmed at the Bradbury Building. Tragedy is texture and background in "Ambassador Hotel", an elegy for the eponymous hotel seen through the eyes of its longtime doorman. Finally, the real intrudes, bluntly, with "Empire Liquor Mart", a story of the tragic shooting of a young African-American woman, Latasha Harlins, in 1992, just days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2018

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Ambassador Suite (Veda)

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