February 06, 2025

(+++) SING HIGH, SING HIGHER

Korngold: Lieder des Abschieds; Brahms: Songs; Clara Schumann: Songs; Robert Schumann: Liederkreis, Op. 39; Der Nussbaum. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, countertenor; John Churchwell, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Le Tre Soprano—The Three Ladies of Ferrara. Amanda Forsythe and Amanda Powell, sopranos; Amanda Crider, mezzo-soprano; Apollo’s Fire conducted by Jeannette Sorrell. AVIE. $19.99.

     Here are a couple of rather curious AVIE discs on which the mezzo-soprano turns out to be the lowest voice. Both recordings are certainly worth hearing for historical as well as purely musical reasons, but it seems unlikely that the music itself – as fine as some of it is – will be the main attraction for listeners to whom the CDs speak, or rather sing, fluently. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen is the latest in a string of countertenors building on the legacy of Alfred Deller (1912-1979) and Deller’s advocate, composer Michael Tippett – but Cohen, unlike Deller and most of his successors, chooses to employ the countertenor voice in the service of Romantic music rather than works from the Renaissance and Baroque time periods. This is a trifle quixotic, as are the specific works that Cohen sings and the order of their presentation. The CD opens with Korngold’s rather dour four-song sequence Lieder des Abschieds, whose focus on death, love and farewell lies rather uneasily in the male falsetto range. Written for medium voice, the songs can be performed by soprano – or countertenor – but their Mahlerian approach to sorrow makes for an odd introduction to Cohen’s recital. He does sing with feeling and emotional, if not vocal, heft, and John Churchwell provides fine piano accompaniment, but the material itself is somewhat at war with the vocal range. The Korngold is followed by something else rather odd: an interweaving of four Brahms songs with four by Clara Schumann, perhaps intended to underline their relationship (a friendship rather than romance, but deeper than many romances ever become) after Robert Schumann’s death. The four Brahms songs are from Op. 59 (No. 7, Mein wundes Herz, and No. 8, Dein blaues Auge hält so still) and Op. 57 (No. 5, In meiner Nächte Sehnen, and No. 8, Unbewegte laue Luft). Clara Schumann’s are her Op. 13, Nos. 1-4: Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen, Sie liebten sich beide, Liebeszauber, and Der Mond kommt still gegangen. The unity of the Clara Schumann material is undermined by intermingling these songs with the four out-of-context ones by Brahms, and while Cohen’s singing – which is clearly the primary point of this CD – is quite fine and suitably expressive, the supra-musical point of alternating Brahms and Clara Schumann interferes with all the songs’ emotionalism rather than expanding upon it. The high point of the disc, by a considerable margin, is Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, which is sung complete and in the intended order. This Liederkreis (not to be confused with Schumann’s other grouping under the same title, Op. 24) brings out the interpretative best in Cohen, who sings with commitment, delicacy and just the right combination of lyricism and naïveté: the very short and upbeat Die Stille encapsulates his approach beautifully, especially when contrasted with darker but scarcely depressive songs such as Wehmut. It is in this cycle that Cohen makes the strongest argument for the effectiveness of the countertenor voice in repertoire with which it is not generally associated. After Liederkreis, the CD concludes, for no very apparent reason except for a title matching Cohen’s middle name, with Der Nussbaum, the third of the 26 songs from Robert Schumann’s Myrthen. This sort of refocuses the recital on Clara Schumann, for whom Myrthen was a wedding gift, but there is no real musical point in doing so: this CD is overly concerned with matters that are in large part extraneous to the music itself. Listeners interested in hearing how a male falsetto handles music not really intended for this vocal range – and in absorbing, in particular, the pleasures to be had from Cohen’s presentation of Liederkreis – will be the most-satisfied audience for this recording.

     The disc called Le Tre Soprano misses out on some alternative title possibilities. Its chosen title should be in the plural, as Soprani or even Sopranos, and it would have been interesting to call the disc “The Three Amandas,” given the first names of all the featured singers. It is logical to think that the secondary portion of the title is intended to distinguish the CD from anything involving the operatic trio known as “The Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras), but in fact the Tre Donne di Ferrara predated the tenor trio by hundreds of years. In the late 1500s, instrumentalist/singers Laura Peverara (age 30), Anna Guarini (age 17), and Livia d’Arco (age 15) brought entertainment and a degree of fame to the duchy of Ferrara, and it is to their story that the latest recording by Apollo’s Fire and its leader, Jeannette Sorrell, refers. Like Cohen’s CD, this one is steeped in matters beyond the musical – Sorrell notes, in particular, that Guarini was murdered by the nobleman to whom she was married, who escaped unpunished (not a surprise in that time and place), while Ferrara itself was annexed to the Papal States in a matter of political intrigue peripherally involving the Tre Donne di Ferrara. Also as with Cohen’s CD, the sociopolitical freight is of little consequence when it comes to the music, providing context but no particular insight. The music itself is what matters here, as it should, and its enjoyment will depend on listeners’ affinity for works of this time period – many of which are heard here in arrangements by Sorrell and others. The pieces presented are unrelated to each other and are presented in five sections designed to show their topical similarities, if not necessarily their musical ones: “Dance of Life,” “In the Palace of Ferrara,” “Love Is Too Much,” “Disdain,” and “May I Have This Dance?” A short work by Monteverdi is the only one from a composer who remains well-known today. The other pieces are by such unfamiliar names as Andrea Falconieri, Luzzascho Luzzaschi, Alessandro Piccinini, Biagio Marini, Samuel Friedrich Capricornus, and others. The music is very much of its time, and as always, the period instruments expertly played by Apollo’s Fire – from Baroque violin and theorbo to Baroque triple harp – create a highly appealing sound world that is quite different from the ones more commonly heard and experienced today. In the vocal offerings, the three Amandas all sing stylishly and with a fine sense of phrasing, whether performing solo or together. The topics of the songs are very much of their time, and the settings fit the words well throughout, so even though there is nothing especially revelatory here either verbally or musically, the CD offers a finely honed, very well-performed journey through the centuries to an aural landscape that may not be to all tastes but that will be a real delight to listeners interested in experiencing some unusual and unusually pleasant material – despite the horrific-by-modern-standards circumstances in which these works were originally created and performed.

(+++) WITH A FRENCH ACCENT

Franck: Piano Quintet; Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet. Apple Hill String Quartet (Elise Kuder and Jesse MacDonald, violins; Mike Kelley, viola; Jacob MacKay, cello); Sally Pinkas, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Michel Merlet: Chamber  Music for Flute, Cello and Piano. Leslie Neighbor Stroud, flute; Peter Zay, cello; Matthew Odell, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     There were considerable differences among the French, German and Italian styles during the Baroque era, although not all of them are readily apparent to modern ears. The differences persisted for centuries, sometimes in notable ways: for example, as opera developed, German style tended to emphasize the orchestra, Italian the voice, and French a fairly equal partnership between the two. The stylistic distinctions, often subtle, inform the basic sound of a wide variety of works, and some continue to be audible even today. Certainly César Franck’s 1879 F minor Piano Quintet (at whose première the piano was played by Saint-Saëns) has emotional and textural underpinnings that mark it as a French work. It is intense and turbulent from its first bars, using two much-repeated four-bar phrases as structural building blocks and proceeding throughout its three movements with sensitivity and sometimes contradictory feelings: the finale is marked Allegro non troppo ma con fuoco, a somewhat puzzling indication that the performers on an MSR Classics release seem to have internalized particularly well. Written late in Franck’s life, the quintet is not a summary of experience but an ardent exploration of the emotional world that the composer visited frequently. The work contrasts interestingly, if not perhaps in a fully satisfying way, with the Piano Quintet of Frank Bridge, a work of a later time period (1905/1912) that is also in a minor key (D minor) but that dates to its composer’s earlier years. British music found its own direction in the 20th century, but this Bridge quintet has some sensibilities in common with Franck’s in its expressiveness, its front-weighting (the first movement is the longest in both pieces), and its considerable lyricism – especially, and to an almost overdone degree, in the central Adagio ma non troppo, a fusing of two movements from the work’s original four-movement version. Sally Pinkas and the Apple Hill String Quartet approach the Bridge with engagement and much the same intensity they bring to the Franck, thus displaying the works in ways that give them more parallelisms than the music, at face value, actually possesses. The gracefulness of the Bridge does owe something to French sensibilities – Bridge had studied various European composers and absorbed elements from many of them – and if the work does not quite have its own voice, it at least speaks with eloquence in the ones Bridge had learned.

     By the later 20th century, French music tended to have more of an international flavor than it possessed earlier, but its poise and precision continued to owe something to history. Another MSR Classics release shows this in chamber music for flute, cello and piano by Michel Merlet (born 1939). Merlet has written a significant number of works and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1966, but his music is not especially well-known and not often recorded: of the seven pieces on this CD, five are world première recordings. The works were composed over a three-decade time frame, 1966 to 1995, but all share a similar sense of balance between or among instruments and a commitment to compositional techniques and sounds of the mid-to-late 20th century. There is one piece for solo flute, Le roque de sol-ut-ré (1995), whose three movements showcase Merlet’s interest in Bach (a consistent element of his style) while also displaying his determination to interpret movements called Prélude, Passacaille and Fugue in ways commensurate with modern sensibilities – including unusual performance techniques and eliciting surprising percussive sounds from the flute. The flute appears with piano in three works: En tous sens… (1966, spelled with ellipsis), Sonatine (1968), and Chacone (1970). The rather dark meandering of the first of these is engaging; the second, in three movements, seems to bend over backwards to assert its dissonant bona fides; the third uses Bach as a jumping-off point and jumps a rather considerable distance. Also here are two works for cello and piano: Une soirée à Nohant (1980) and Prélude–Interlude–Postlude (1992). The first, labeled Élégie, is warm enough and delves into a degree of lyricism, although it is something short of elegiac; the second is explicitly tied to Bach – its opening comes directly from his works – and contrasts the two instruments in intriguing ways, keeping them separate until the concluding movement. The longest piece on the CD is a four-movement Trio for flute, cello and piano, dating to 1983 and neatly encapsulating Merlet’s varying interests in Bach’s music, in contemporary sounds and performance practices, and in combinatorial musical aesthetics. Although not the most-recent work on the disc, it functions as a kind of summation of the elements of the other six, all of which are played with dedication and style by the three very accomplished performers. Elements of Merlet’s music draw on distinctly French sensibilities – notably in some of the ways he employs the flute – while other material is much more of its time and much less of Merlet’s nationality and geography. The music will appeal mostly to people who enjoy works of the time period in which these pieces were written: there is certainly skill in evidence throughout the works, if not perhaps any particular interest in breaking free from conventions of a specific time period and trying to forge new and distinctive musical impressions.

January 30, 2025

(++++) THEMES AND VARIATIONS

Let’s Fix Up the House. By Robert Pizzo. Schiffer Kids. $9.99.

Let’s Fix Up the Yard. By Robert Pizzo. Schiffer Kids. $9.99.

     Clichés become clichés because there is a kernel of truth in them. Sometimes more than a kernel. It is a cliché of children’s books, especially board books for the youngest readers and pre-readers, that their visuals must be sweet and simple and unworldly, their content educational in only the most simplistic sense possible, their ability to teach largely limited to such foundational concepts as the numbers 1-10 or formulaic illustrations of objects beginning with specific letters of the alphabet. Not all board books are formulaic, but enough of them are so that families looking for new ones can quickly become dismayed by the sameness of far too many of the offerings.

     But then there are Robert Pizzo’s books. Pizzo has the rather revolutionary idea that children, even the youngest children, are interested in the everyday world around them, and can be taught about it even if they are too young to read detailed explanations about real-world objects and tasks. They can, he asserts, familiarize themselves not only with the latest version of “K is for Kangaroo” and “Z is for Zebra” but also with elements of the world that they are far more likely to encounter in their own lives than all the intriguing-looking creatures with whom they are highly unlikely ever to interact.

     Thus, in Let’s Fix Up the House and Let’s Fix Up the Yard, Pizzo uses geometric precision and a clear understanding of how things work to present, in board-book form, quotidian tools and the ways people use them – very likely including young children’s own parents and, perhaps sooner rather than later, the children themselves. The result is to-do lists in highly visual, semi-realistic form: not fully realistic in illustration, since the tools and tasks are boiled down to their essences for purposes of clarity, but quite realistic in showing just what those tools and tasks involve and how they are done.

     In each book, the left-hand pages, which open with the words “We’ll need,” show a specific stylized tool of some sort, while the right-hand pages show the tool in use and illustrate what it accomplishes. Pizzo’s art has clarity and precision that make the whole process look simple, although it is anything but: he manages to boil down to its essence every task and technique, so even very young children can see what a real-world item looks like and how it manages real-world accomplishments.

     So Let’s Fix Up the House shows, on one left-hand page, a hammer – stripped to its essence and drawn so it is instantly recognizable. The right-hand page shows a stylized adult – think of a very colorful version of the figures used to illustrate warning signs or public restrooms – about to use the hammer to drive a nail into a strip of wood above a window, with the words “to nail the wood trim.” Another page says “We’ll need a level” – and it is a beautifully rendered one, with three different bubbles allowing leveling at different angles – opposite a page that says “to straighten the shelf,” on which the use of a level to do just that is shown with straightforward exactness. And there is the left-hand age featuring a saw, with a right-hand one saying “to cut the lumber” and making it abundantly clear just how that happens. To wrap up the book with a slight twist, the final pages say “We’ll need a vacuum” – a shop vac, to be precise, and yes, it is precisely drawn and looks nothing like a standard in-house vacuum – “to clean up. All done!” That is a great summary lesson: cleaning up thoroughly after completing a project is a crucial step that all too many adults neglect. Kids won’t, after they absorb Pizzo’s presentation: they will know that cleanup is integral to fix-up.

     Let’s Fix Up the Yard follows the same narrative and presentation pattern with equal effectiveness. On one two-page spread, “We’ll need a leaf blower – to collect the leaves,” and the handheld blower is shown in just enough detail to make its real-world appearance clear, while the person using it is wearing ear protection and the larger-than-in-real-life and beautifully colored fall leaves are flying around the page. Elsewhere, what is needed is a wheelbarrow “to haul the dirt,” which is shown piled high and, for a touch of amusement, with a bird perched atop the mound and looking at the person pushing the load along. Whether as simple as a pack of seeds “to grow the vegetables” or as complex-looking as a cement mixer “to pour the concrete,” every outdoor tool and item is put on display with admirable clarity and shown in use in ways that children of just about any age will be able to understand. The very end of the yard-focused book is more amusing than the end of the house-focused one, and quite equally accurate. “We’ll need to rest” (the picture shows the two adults, male and female, wiping their foreheads after some very taxing work) – “when we’re all done!” And that last bit of art, with the two hard-working people lounging on chairs in a yard whose spiffy appearance directly picks up on earlier illustrations that showed them performing various tasks, certainly communicates just how well-earned their rest is. Indeed, the clarity of communication in Let’s Fix Up the House and Let’s Fix Up the Yard is always front-and-center, showing Pizzo’s exceptional ability to rethink the basics of illustrative education, demonstrating that even the well-worn format of the board book does not need to come across as if it is worn out.

(+++) THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW

Mendelssohn: Transcriptions by Andreas N. Tarkmann—“Songs without Words” for Oboe and String Orchestra; Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra for Flute, Harp and String Orchestra. Ramón Ortega Quero, oboe; Anette Maiburg, flute; Emmanuel Ceysson, harp; Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim conducted by Douglas Bostock. Coviello. $22.95.

Edward Smaldone: Beauty of Innuendo; Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire); Murmurations; June 2011; What no one else sees... New Focus Recordings. $18.99.

Paul Lansky: Patterns (in wood and metal); Metal Light; Hop; Touch and Go. Bridge Records. $16.99.

Dante De Silva: Shibui—a dirge in memory of my mentor, Deborah Clasquin; Four Years of Fog; Katherine Balch & Katie Ford: estrangement. Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano; Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, piano. False Azure Records. $15.

     The mellifluousness of Mendelssohn’s music is so pervasive that its loveliness comes through not only in its original form but also in arrangements that allow instruments other than the originally planned ones to partake of its lyricism. There is no inherent reason to transcribe Mendelssohn – his sense of apt ways to explore the engaging and emotive qualities of the instruments he chose for his works is unerring – but doing so is certainly tempting for arrangers such as Andreas N. Tarkmann. On a new Coviello CD, Tarkmann’s arrangement for oboe and strings of seven Songs without Words proves a highly enjoyable way of hearing these small salon-like piano pieces in a new guise that expands their expressiveness while remaining basically true to their small scale and underlying delicacy. The works in this charming suite are Op. 19, No. 1; Op. 30, No. 4; Op. 30, No. 6; Op. 85, No. 6; Op. 67, No. 5; Op. 67, No. 6; and Op. 30, No. 2. All of Tarkmann’s transcriptions are sensitive and pleasant, and all are played stylishly and engagingly by Ramón Ortega Quero with accompaniment led by Douglas Bostock. Op. 30, No. 6 (Venetianisches Gondellied) is a particular charmer with its pizzicato underpinning, and following it with the sprightly Op. 85, No. 6 was an especially good idea. And the gently rocking Op. 67, No. 6 comes across quite delightfully as heard here. In truth, the entire suite is a very pleasurable experience, remaining basically true to Mendelssohn while shining some new light on the small jewels that are the Songs without Words. The D minor Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra is a larger work, lasting 40 minutes, and quite an early one: Mendelssohn wrote it when he was 14, and it is one of the pieces lending credence to the comparisons made in Mendelssohn’s lifetime between him and Mozart. Likely influenced by a double concerto for the same instruments by Hummel, Mendelssohn’s work lies well on the solo instruments and is especially sensitive to then recently developed violin techniques. Tarkmann’s transcription obviously minimizes that element of the composition, but it actually increases parallels with Mozart, who wrote his own flute-and-harp concerto (K. 299/297c). The original Mendelssohn work is not especially well-known, so many listeners will not have it in mind while hearing this flute-and-harp version – and even those who do know the original will enjoy the setting of different solo instruments against the same string orchestra for which Mendelssohn composed the piece. The delicacy of playing by the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim is noteworthy here, and the unusual interplay of flute and harp gives the concerto a sound quite different from, yet obviously related to, its original one. Unlike the Songs without Words suite, however, this concerto rearrangement has more of an experimental feeling about it: there is nothing particularly revelatory about the transcription, which seems mostly like an exercise in what Tarkmann can do with a work of early Romantic sensibility conceived on a substantial scale. Anette Maiburg and Emmanuel Ceysson play the concerto with skill and a good sense of enjoyment of its pleasantries, and Bostock ensures fine ensemble support throughout. But it is only in the shortest movement, a central Adagio whose opening actually foreshadows the later Songs without Words, that the flute-and-harp combination really shines. Tarkmann’s transcription is a contemporary reimagining of this early Mendelssohn gem, but this is not a work that in any way cries out for a new approach: it deserves to be better-known in its original version, to which this arrangement, although certainly well-made, ultimately adds very little.

     Today’s composers may be influenced not only by their contemporaries and the works of the recent past, but also by differing types of music – as well as nonmusical material. Edward Smaldone (born 1956) is one composer who casts an especially wide net, as is shown on a New Focus Recordings release of five of his works for various sizes and types of ensembles. Beauty of Innuendo and June 2011 are orchestral pieces, both here conducted by Michael Toms, the first featuring the Brno Philharmonic and the second the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beauty of Innuendo is a rather intense, brassy, proclamatory work with contrasting lyrical touches and an overall sound of emphatic intensity. June 2011 is more jazzy and less Coplandesque, with pointed xylophone and glockenspiel elements. Toms and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra also perform Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire), an extended piano-and-orchestra work requiring the soloist (Niklas Sivelöv) to engage with a wide variety of styles and some decidedly over-the-top passages showing the influence of multiple compositional approaches. This is an impressively spun-out piece that is perhaps a touch too breathless for its own good but that, as it progresses, certainly will have listeners wondering what is coming next. Another solo-and-ensemble work here, Murmurations, is more modest in scope: it features clarinetist Søren-Filip Brix Hansen with the wind orchestra Den Kongelige Livgardes Musikkorps conducted by Giordano Bellincampi. Somewhat self-consciously imitative of avian communication, the piece is interesting for some of its wind-against-winds settings. Winds are also the focus of What no one else sees… (spelled that way, including ellipsis). This is a pleasant, largely lighthearted three-movement work for woodwind quintet (played by a group called Opus Zoo). The movement titles – “Playful,” “Serious,” and “Free Spirited” – sum up the moods of the work rather well, although there is a somewhat sly hint of the not-too-serious in the central movement. These disparate pieces show Smaldone’s interest in a wide variety of compositional techniques and influences and highlight the varying effects of his focuses on different organizational principles, musical structures and stylistic approaches.

     The commonality of the four works on a new CD featuring music by Paul Lansky (born 1944) is the pieces’ focus on percussion, in various forms and combinations. Lansky writes a wide variety of music – this is the 18th Bridge Records release of his work – and has some interesting combinatorial ideas. For example, instead of an all-strings or all-woodwind grouping, Lansky creates a mallet quartet for his 2011 Patterns (in wood and metal). Performed by Gwendolyn Dease, Ji Hye Jung, Jisu Jung, and Ayano Kataoka, the piece is an evocative one in which the percussive elements are frequently downplayed in favor of the production of a kind of sound cloud from which individual instruments emerge periodically and into which they are then subsumed. Dease is the featured performer on the other works here, being the sole player of Metal Light (2017) for vibraphone and small percussion set. This is a mostly gentle piece with a sense of temple bells and crotales about it, but also incorporating some livelier sections. Hop (1993), for marimba (Dease) and violin (Yvonne Lam), does indeed bounce about here and there, without any particular sense of forward motion. Its most interesting aspect lies in Lansky’s use of the contrasting legato capabilities of the stringed instrument with the staccato propensities of the marimba – and the way each of those blends, sometimes surprisingly, into the other. The most-extended work on this disc is the three-movement Touch and Go (2012) for percussionist (Dease) and wind ensemble (the Michigan State University Wind Symphony conducted by Kevin Sedatole). The movements, of nearly equal length, are labeled “Tap,” “Stroke,” and “Tag,” but in this case the titles give a relative paucity of clues to the musical material. The work actually has a fairly traditional fast-slow-fast structure, the first movement bright and ebullient, the second quiet and atmospheric, and the third rather puckish and playful. More than the other pieces on this CD, Touch and Go is fun to hear and is appealing through its integration of percussion into a larger whole with inherently contrasting sound. Dease plays all the works on the disc with considerable aplomb, bringing forth different sounds from the varying percussion instruments and having a sure sense of when to attempt to blend with other players and when to stand out from them. In addition to a treat for listeners who enjoy Lansky’s music, the CD is an enjoyable way to hear some listenable modern pieces in which percussion is brought to the forefront and shown to have expressive capabilities beyond those with which it is usually credited.

     It is the expressiveness of piano and the human voice that is the focus of a False Azure Records release featuring works by Dante De Silva (born 1978) and Katherine Balch (born 1991) – with Balch’s using poetry by Katie Ford (born 1975). This is a disc of highly personal material throughout, and will really be suitable listening only for those who share the experiences of the creators and have mentally/emotionally processed them the same way. In the case of De Silva’s music, it also helps a great deal to know and be interested in the difference in tuning systems between equal temperament (the standard in most cases for many years) and just temperament (which provides more intervallic purity at a cost of greater performance complexity and melodic flattening). The tuning element is abstruse for most people but is in one sense the most interesting element of the disc, because the first piece recorded, Shibui, opens the CD in equal temperament and closes it in just temperament, providing an unusual chance to hear the clear distinctions between the tuning systems. As for Shibui itself, it is one of those you-had-to-be-there pieces, being a tribute to pianist Deborah Clasquin, who taught both De Silva and performer Ryan MacEvoy McCullough. Elements of the work relate to the specific musical interests of Clasquin, and since the piece was written for McCullough to play at Clasquin’s memorial service, the entire thing bears considerably more weight than its three-minute length would seem able to bear. For most listeners, the chance to hear it played two different ways, or rather in two different auditory systems, will be its primary attraction. As for De Silva’s Four Years of Fog (2016), this is specifically written for just-tuned piano and is intended to reflect the composer’s experiences as an undergraduate. Surely those experiences parallel the ones of others in similar circumstances, but the music is not specifically referential to anything to which listeners will be able to attach their own experiential memories. The four movement titles do give some guidance to the feelings the work is intended to evoke or memorialize: “Blissfully Ignorant,” “Sickness and Exile,” “A New Adolescence,” and “The Local Zenith.” But those titles are scarcely specific enough (or generally applicable enough) to be guideposts for listeners. The clarity of sound made possible by just tuning will be the most salient characteristic of Four Years of Fog for most audiences. As for Balch’s estrangement (the title is not capitalized), it is one of many modern relationship-ending musings, filled with phrases apparently meant to be meaningful but in practice sounding rather stilted (“the wash of the cellular level,” “a coffin of slur,” “it begins in loathing,” “the gore of actual heart,” etc.). Lucy Fitz Gibbon sings, or rather emotes, expressively enough, but the actual settings of Ford’s words make the verbiage often too difficult to hear and process. And as often occurs in similar works, knowledge of the piece’s origin is crucial for a full appreciation of it: it is supposed to be a modern female response to Schumann’s Dichterliebe and the Heine poetry on which it is based, although nothing in estrangement makes that the slightest bit apparent. Certainly the works by De Silva and Balch/Ford are heartfelt, but unless a listener’s heart feels just the same things that De Silva and Balch/Ford felt when experiencing elements of their lives and producing music exploring those elements, the communicative potential of these works will be minimal at best.