Charles Wuorinen, “The Dante Trilogy” (1993-1996)

“In his long composing life, Charles Wuorinen has drawn on an extremely wide range of intellectual and musical inspirations, including many from science and literature. The Dante Trilogy is among his most ambitious compositions, its source one of the great works of the Western intellectual canon. The three ballets each correspond to one of the books of Dante’s Divina Commedia: The Mission of Virgil to Inferno, The Great Procession to Purgatorio, and The River of Light to Paradiso; although rather than attempting to mirror the whole of Dante’s narrative, Wuorinen’s music relates to the detail and atmosphere of the books.”    —Naxos