Album Evaluation: Eric Starr | Between the Sandhills and the Sea

Eric Starr
Between the Sandhills and the Sea: A Tribute to Vera Brittain & Winifred Holtby
(Bronx Sure Data)

Chilly Spring composer Eric Starr’s tribute to 2 heroic and impactful ladies of the early twentieth century is a provocative and heart-wrenching celebration of perseverance. One of many ladies, Vera Brittain, a nurse who cared for British and German troopers on the entrance traces, misplaced her brother, her fiance, and her grief-stricken father in World Struggle I. Winifred Holtby’s prose of life and loss and work in South Africa is equally intense and compelling. Their seductively weak ideas and shattered hearts are interspersed all through the actions of this eloquent and melancholy chamber music. The compositions, narrated by achieved actor Sonya Cassidy and carried out by violinist/cellist Hannah Holman and pianist Michelle Alvarado are intensely resolute and reflective, alternatingly pensive and probing; a meditation on the utterly unreasonable and considerably unhinged will to do good and stick with it within the face of unthinkable struggling.