Album Notes

Your companions along the garden path include songs by Roger Quilter, Richard Strauss, Alexander Spendiarian, Romanos Melikian, Carlos Guastavino, and my father, Earl Zindars...in all, a hundred years of song represented in varying moods and four languages. Lovely piano accompaniment throughout by Kerrilyn Renshaw.

The highlight of this enchanting album is the world-premier of four previously unrecorded songs by Earl Zindars. Throughout his lifetime, Zindars received numerous commissions and performances of his classical compositions by renowned ensembles worldwide, but he remains better known as the long-favored songwriter of his friend, the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans.

The music on this recording represents some of the many beautiful aspects of the garden as it passes through the changing seasons. In the opening song by Quilter, we begin our journey away from home as we wander through nature, in search of new joy. The Strauss set includes three of his most charming early songs, as well as one of his Four Last Songs, “September”, written in 1948 while exiled in Switzerland. We reconcile Strauss’s “dying garden dream” as part of the cycle of life and consider the presence of beauty even amid sorrow. Melikian and Spendiarian, also composers in exile, likewise look to nature for solace. Nowhere, though, is the longing for home more poignantly expressed than in the poetry of Luis Cernuda’s Las Nubes, as realized by Argentinian composer Carlos Guastavino in “Jardín Antiguo”, “Deseo”, and “Alegría de la Soledad”. Here we come full cycle – loss, longing for permanence, an end to the wandering – to come to a place so beautiful, that the author’s only wish is for time to stand still. Closing the selections with the music of Zindars, we have finally returned home. Included here is the final song he composed for me, “The Eve of Ascension Day”, as well as his musical adaptations of poetry by Carl Sandburg. A fellow Chicago artist, my father admired Sandburg’s ability to recognize overlooked beauty in an urban setting, and express it in his works.

This is the second album from award-winning singer Helene Zindarsian.

Other recordings available include:
"A Mother's Love"

*** 2006 Winner ***
"Best Classical Voice/Opera Solo Album of the Year"
- Just Plain Folks Music Awards

*** 2005 Nominee ***
"Best Classical Vocal Album"
- Armenian Music Awards