The Woodstock Cycle 1999

Magdalen at the Tomb

For more than a century, Woodstock has been a center for the creative and performing arts. Long before the famous concert of 1969, painters, writers, composers, designers, musicians, actors, singers and dancers, made their homes and studios on this mystical spot where the Catskill Mountains overlook the Hudson Valley. Men and women seeking a fuller spiritual life have also found an especially sacred atmosphere in the landscape around Woodstock.

The connections between art and religion, creativity and the spirit, inspired a number of Woodstock artists associated with St. Gregory's Episcopal Church to inaugurate the Woodstock Cycle in 1999. Conceived as an annual event, the Woodstock Cycle commissions original settings of sacred stories by writers and composers who live in and around Woodstock. This disc is a record of the first offering of the Cycle, which included three World Premieres and was first presented on the evening of July 31, 1999 at St. Gregory's Church.

Listen to Robert Starer and Gail Godwin's Magdalen at the Tomb from The Woodstock Cycle.