Aksel! Arias by Bach, Handel and
Mozart. Aksel Rykkvin, treble; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
conducted by Nigel Short. Signum Classics. $17.99.
Donizetti: Arias from “Rita,” “La
Favorite,” “Don Pasquale,” “Dom Sebastien,” “L’Elisir d’Amore” and “La Fille du
Regiment”; Bellini: Arias from “I Puritani.” Lawrence Brownlee, tenor;
Kansas State Choir and Kansas City Symphony Orchestra conducted by Constantine
Orbelian. Delos. $16.99.
So Many Things. Anne Sofie
von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Brooklyn Rider (Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen,
violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello). Naïve. $16.99.
Mohammed Fairouz: Zabur. Dann
Coakwell, tenor; Michael Kelly, baritone; Indianapolis Children’s Choir,
Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by
Eric Stark. Naxos. $12.99.
Performer-focused vocal
recordings are all about the sound of a particular voice – that sound generally
matters more than the specific music in which it is heard. These are usually
“fan” recordings, offering listeners familiar with the singer a chance to hear
him or her at length without giving any particular thought to musical or
dramatic continuity. Once in a while, though, a performer-focused recording
also sheds new light on the music performed, and in so doing may bring a
previously unknown singer to a much wider audience. That is the case with the
Signum Classics release called Aksel!
Aksel Rykkvin is a 13-year-old Norwegian boy soprano who sings in a way that few
listeners are likely to have heard. Boy sopranos are not quite as rare in
classical music as the long-gone castrati, whose voices were somewhat similar –
but they are rare enough. Leonard Bernstein once used a boy soprano as soloist
in the final movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, which is a child’s view of
heaven, producing an interesting experiment – however, Mahler wrote the
movement for a female soprano quite deliberately. Most of the time, boy
sopranos are heard within choral works or in short recitals, and their careers
are quite short, limited by the reality of male vocal changes during the
teenage years. All of this makes the material sung by Aksel Rykkvin that much more
precious. The CD features almost an hour of his singing and includes six works
by Bach, nine by Handel and three by Mozart. The purity of Rykkvin’s voice is
quite wonderful, and his assuredness in negotiating the very high register and
complexities of musical lines – notably in the Handel arias – is exceptional.
The biggest surprise here, though, is the very high degree of musical
intelligence underlying these performances. Despite his age, Rykkvin has been
thoroughly trained in the structure and emotions of classical music, and while
he may lack the life experience to relate personally to some of the material,
his sensitivity to its strictly musical nuances is considerable. This is
especially noticeable in his handling of the two arias sung by Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro: Rykkvin brings just
the right blend of naïveté and enthusiasm to Voi, che sapete and Non so più
cosa son. But these are only two of the highlights here; in fact, the whole
CD is nothing but highlights. Rykkvin shows himself able to sing and emote in
multiple languages: Italian, Latin, German and English – the Messiah arias, How beautiful are the feet and Thou
art gone up on high, are especially effective, although immediately
following them with Let the bright
Seraphim from Samson is a bit
odd. Actually, the sequence of material here is the only real negative: there
is little textual or musical reason for hearing these particular pieces in this
particular order. That fact, however, speaks to the “vocal showcase” element of
the disc: this release introduces a remarkable young voice, one that listeners
will find captivating, but the specific pieces Rykkvin sings matter less than
the fact that he is the one singing them.
Something similar may be
said of tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s new Delos CD, which features nine arias by
Donizetti and two by Bellini. Brownlee is firmly in mid-career – he was born in
1973 – and well-established as a master of the bel canto repertoire. Thus, there is nothing surprising about the
selection of material on this disc, the purpose of which is simply to give
Brownlee fans a chance to hear him performing the sort of material in which he
excels. The fans will not be disappointed: Brownlee’s full, rich tone is
everywhere apparent in these mostly well-known arias, and his pinpoint accuracy
extends throughout his vocal range – there is no sense of strain even at the
top. The result is a very fine exploration of material that has been sung very
well by very many tenors over the years. Brownlee does bring a sense of
heightened emotion to a number of the arias in operas that are, after all,
melodramas, in which emotion is supposed to run at fever pitch; and he
humanizes characters effectively, as in Una
furtiva lagrima from L’Elisir
d’Amore. Unfortunately, one of Brownlee’s remarkable accomplishments is
missing here: the two arias from Bellini’s I
Puritani are A te, o cara and Son salvo, and he certainly handles both
of them well, but it is Credeasi, misera,
with its near-impossible high F, that Brownlee has mastered to exceptional
effect (the note used to be sung falsetto, at a time when tenors used their
voices differently from the way they use them today). Of course, anyone
unfamiliar with Brownlee will not know what is absent here and will be more
than satisfied with the vocal quality he brings to all the material that he
does present. This is nevertheless a (+++) CD, simply because it offers a spate
of well-known material sung by a very fine but scarcely unknown singer. None of
this will matter to fans, however: they will want the disc as further evidence
of the consistently high quality of Brownlee’s performances.
Fans of Anne Sofie von Otter
may be the target audience for the mezzo-soprano’s (+++) CD with the quartet
known as Brooklyn Rider, but it is far from certain that fans will find the recording
congenial. This Naïve release is neither more nor less than a crossover disc,
using elements of vocal and instrumental classical music to present material
that is all over the musical map: two works by Björk, one by Sting, one by Elvis Costello, one by John Adams, and
others by Kate Bush, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Anders Hillborg, Brad Mehldau
and Rufus Wainwright – plus one by quartet member Colin Jacobsen. The quality
of the musical material is also all over the place. The sort of listener who will
be attracted to this disc is one who not only wants to hear music by the
specific composers represented – in arrangements for voice and string quartet –
but also wants to listen as von Otter presents herself in various vocal guises.
Thus, her operatic self shows up in Am I
in Your Light? from Adams’ Doctor
Atomic – which is juxtaposed with Bush’s Pi, in which von Otter more or less channels her inner Lotte Lenya.
Later, Costello’s Speak Darkly, My Angel
comes across with considerable tenderness and proves to be the most moving
track on the disc. There is less to the two new works heard here, Shaw’s Cant voi l’aube and Jacobsen’s For Sixty Cents. Von Otter has done
crossover before, and clearly finds it a pleasant break from the exigencies of
opera: there is little here that calls fully on the richness of her vocal
capabilities. A fine presentation for fans of both the singer and the quartet,
the CD makes no attempt to reach out beyond that core group: it is neither a very
good or serious introduction to von Otter’s very considerable vocal talents nor
an especially attractive or well-organized collection from a musical
standpoint.
The seriousness of Mohammed
Fairouz’ latest oratorio, Zabur, is
beyond doubt: indeed, the nearly unending gloom of this hour-long work insists
again and again that listeners pay attention and share in the doom-laden
atmosphere. Written in 2015 to a libretto by Najla Said, Zabur (Arabic for “Psalms”) pulls the Biblical David and Gabriel
into the modern age of unceasing war in the Middle East and showcases the
Psalms against the background of a doomed group of refugees in a
soon-to-be-destroyed temporary shelter (Fairouz’ music starts with the
destruction, backpedals, then moves forward until the destruction happens again
– as gloomy a structure as he and Said can imagine). The unremittingly dour setting is sometimes
reflected in David’s songs and poetry, which he and the other refugees sing and
chant; at other times, David reaches out, through his Psalms, for a sense of
wonder, beauty and meaning beyond the everyday terrors of death and
destruction. Fairouz clearly wants there to be something positive here to
prevent the oratorio from being unremittingly depressive, but the attempt does
not work: the eventual destruction, foretold at the beginning, hangs over the
entire oratorio and permeates even the more-uplifting poetry and song. What
Fairouz is doing is seeking timelessness for his message by combining Biblical
elements with a contemporary setting – but it is not entirely clear what his and
Said’s message is intended to be. If it is one of enduring the travails of the
world despite everything, a notion that somehow something (art? poetry?)
survives even when the human creators of that something are dead and gone, then
it is a fine concept, if scarcely a new one. But there remains discordance
between the war-requiem aspects of Zabur
and its attempts to find some way to provide some semblance of some sort of
hope. This world première
recording is well-paced, well-sung and sensitively played by all concerned –
the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir actually commissioned the work. But while
those who admire Fairouz’ music will find what he does here in line with his
other work, others will likely discover that this (+++) CD never quite seems to
gel either musically or as an attempt to garner emotional outreach that
transcends the unending wars around which it is conceptually built.
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