Out of the Shadows: Rediscovered
American Art Songs. Lisa Delan, soprano; Kevin Korth, piano; Matt
Haimovitz, cello. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).
Richard Danielpour: Songs of
Solitude; War Songs; Toward the Splendid City. Thomas Hampson, baritone;
Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos. $12.99.
Let Me Fly: A Celebration of
American Choral Music. University of South Dakota Chamber Singers conducted
by David Holdhusen. Navona. $14.99.
Aidan Andrew Dun: Honeyland.
Adan Andrew Dun, spoken poetry; Lucie Rejchrtová, piano. Ravello. $14.99.
Cadence: New Works for Voices in
Verse by David Kirtley, Joanne D. Carey, Timothy Kramer and Christopher J. Hoh.
Navona. $14.99.
It is always a pleasure to
rediscover first-quality lost music – or music that has been misplaced, if not
exactly lost. And that is just what the performers have done on a new PentaTone
release offering 31 songs by 10 American composers of both the recent and more-distant
past. One of the most affecting works here, and the longest single song, is the
only original composition by a living composer on the disc. And interestingly,
the material may be familiar to listeners even though the song itself probably
is not. This is A Letter from Sullivan
Ballou by John Kander (born 1927), whose text is a letter used by Ken Burns
in his widely watched documentary about the U.S. Civil War. Kander gives the
lengthy and deeply moving letter a straightforward yet evocative setting,
allowing the words – in which Ballou expresses both his deepest love of family
and his equally heartfelt love of country – to flow freely and to evoke
listeners’ feelings effectively, without any knowledge of Ballou himself being
necessary. Ballou was a Union Army officer from Rhode Island who was killed at
age 32 at the battle called First Manassas by the South and First Bull Run by
the North. His letter – found in his effects after he died – anticipates his
likely death and places it in both a personal context and a societal one. The
writing is eloquent in its straightforwardness and is not that of an uneducated
man: Ballou was a lawyer and politician. Kander’s song and Ballou’s words are
all the more touching at a time when the United States is so riven by 21st-century
divisions – some of which trace back to Ballou’s time and even before. Other
living composers are also represented in very fine performances on this release
– although their works are arrangements of existing material, not entirely new
songs. David Garner (born 1954) contributes Auld
Lang Syne in an arrangement for soprano, cello and piano; Gordon Getty
(born 1933) offers Shenandoah for the
same forces; and Jack Perla (born 1959) proffers Home, Sweet Home in a similar arrangement. The remaining works on
this recording – all of them performed with very considerable sensitivity and
attunement to the composers’ expressive intensions – are groups or song cycles.
There are six selected songs by Paul Nordoff (1909-1977) and three by Randall
Thompson (1899-1984), the four Blue
Mountain Ballads by Paul Bowles (1910-1999), seven Songs of Love and Longing by Stephen Paulus (1949-2014), Songs on Four Poems by e.e. cummings by
John Duke (1899-1984), and Three Songs of
Adieu by Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008) – one of the best-known composers
here, whose songs immediately precede Kander’s Ballou setting in a way that
both leads into it effectively and gives it well-thought-out context. A number
of the works here are première
recordings or premières using a
female voice, but the attractiveness of the release lies less in what has or
has not been recorded before than in the overall high quality of all the
settings and performances, and the skill with which the various composers evoke
emotions of many kinds, each of them heartfelt in its own way.
A new Naxos recording of
music by Richard Danielpour (born 1956) includes two extended song cycles that
are both world première
recordings and that show yet another first-rate American composer turning
thoughts and compositional skills to matters fraught with considerable
emotional resonance. Danielpour’s five War
Songs (2008) actually have a strong connection with Kander’s setting of
Ballou’s letter: Danielpour here sets five texts by Walt Whitman, whose Civil
War activities and poems are well-known, the most popular of them being the
most conventional, O Captain! My Captain!
That is not one of the poems chosen by Danielpour, and for good reason:
although the words in War Songs are
by Whitman and the cycle was written to commemorate the 150th anniversary
of the end of the Civil War, Danielpour’s motivation for writing the music was
a conflict of the 21st century: the Iraq War, and the young men and
women whose lives it claimed. Thomas Hampson, whose Hampsong Foundation
commissioned War Songs, performs the
music with just the right blend of evenness and emotional intensity, and the
effect of the final and longest song, Come
Up from the Fields Father, which lasts half the length of the whole cycle,
is especially affecting here. The accompaniment by the Nashville Symphony under
Giancarlo Guerrero is nuanced and subtle throughout, fitting the music very
well indeed. Hampson and Guerrero are also well-teamed for Songs of Solitude (2002), yet another of the many, many works
written as a response to the terrorist murders of September 11, 2001.
Danielpour manages to make his evocative six-song cycle stand out, however,
because here as in War Songs, he
chooses texts not directly related to the events that inspired the composition
but fitting them closely and often in surprising ways. The poems here are by
William Butler Yeats, and again it is the longest song of the cycle, The Second Coming, that comes across
with greatest intensity and seems most strongly related to the overall theme
(although here the climactic song is the penultimate one, before Epilogue). The CD concludes with the
only work on it that has been recorded before, Toward the Splendid City (1992), an orchestral portrait of New York
– again, something that has been done innumerable times, by many composers.
Danielpour’s distinctiveness here comes from a somewhat acerbic take on the
city, which, on the basis of this music, he seems to find fascinating, even
enthralling, but scarcely an always-positive place to experience even in the
decade before the terrorist murders.
The songs are far more
straightforward on a new Navona CD called Let
Me Fly, which highlights the exceptional quality of the University of South
Dakota Chamber Singers under David Holdhusen. The 18 works here collectively
create a pleasing mixture of the secular and the sacred, albeit with some
slightly jarring transitions from one to the other. James Erb’s version of Shenandoah on this disc makes a very
interesting contrast with Gordon Getty’s, since the original lyrics are the
words of a man, while Getty gives the song to a female voice and Erb arranges
it for chorus. The simple harmonic beauty of the song stands out in each case.
Other traditional pieces – especially Dixie
(arranged by Norman Luboff) and Go, Tell
It on the Mountain (arranged by Stacey Gibbs) – are also especially
attractive as handled by the 40-member South Dakota chorus. Stephen Chatman’s
setting of the World War I song, In
Flanders Fields, is also very emotive. But there is lighter material here
as well, including a kind of crossover-to-pop song, Someplace by Jocelyn Hagen, and Ward Swingle’s pleasant and lively
arrangement of Country Dances. It
would be exaggerating to say that there is profundity in these choral works,
but there is certainly emotion, considerable pathos if little tragedy, and many
opportunities for this well-balanced, well-conducted choral ensemble to show
its ability to handle American works ranging from folk and gospel material to
light and bouncy fare.
Matters are considerably
more rarefied and intellectual – and less emotionally telling – on a (+++) Ravello
CD featuring poetry written and spoken by Aidan Andrew Dun. This is material
that strives to show how offbeat (sometimes literally) and unusual it is,
insisting that it is special rather than showing how special it is in a
more-modest way. Dun tends to draw attention to himself to a greater extent
than to his poetry, wanting to emphasize to the audience how poetic he is
through titles such as Her Feet as Two
White Swans and Invitation to the
Golden Quatrain. In striving for a new way to present material – for
reasons that are never particularly clear – Dun comes up with something akin to
old-fashioned melodrama (words spoken over music) with an overlay of Sprechstimme. Essentially, what he does
is to recite words over keyboard accompaniment that, despite the more-than-dutiful
playing of Lucie Rejchrtová, has a distinctly subsidiary role that often
involves simply repeating rhythmic material again and again – although
Rejchrtová’s periodic use of electronic enhancements is occasionally
intriguing. Dun’s expressiveness is quite conventional as poetry (“the sadness
of my disconnection,” “the heaviness radiates out of my disenchanted being,” “monstrous
stratifications of ugliness,” etc.), although some of his evocations of
specific places or states of being come through tellingly (Insomnia, for example). This is not so much a recording of music as
it is a spoken-word poetry disc whose appeal will be exclusively to those who
find Dun’s verbiage attractive and his emoting convincing.
A (+++) Navona anthology CD
called Cadence is also of limited
appeal – although in this case, the inclusion of material by four composers
with some significant differences in style increases the likelihood that
listeners not already familiar with the material will find at least some of it
congenial. Certainly there is poetry on this disc that is far more involving
than Dun’s rather maundering work: poems by William Blake and Carl Sandburg are
among those set by the composers here. However, the fact that these poets’
works are well-known and have often been set to music before puts a high burden
on contemporary composers’ use of the material – a burden borne here with
varying degrees of success. Joanne D. Carey offers sophisticated settings of
Blake’s The Lamb (performed by the
Stanbery Singers under Paul Stanbery) and The
Tyger (performed by Vox Futura under Andrew Shenton), but Blake’s mysticism
and use of straightforward language to communicate multifaceted and
multilayered concepts does not meld particularly well with Carey’s dissonances
and insistent rhythms. As for Sandburg, five of his works are set by
Christopher J. Hoh in a cycle, is also performed by the Stansbery ensemble, called
Remembering All: Five Sandburg Poems.
Here the music is generally fairly effective at elucidating or underlining the
emotions of the words to Joy, Monotone,
Under the Harvest Moon, I Sang and Follies.
The existential simplicity of the works’ settings is nicely reflected in music
that, even at its most upbeat, retains a veneer of lyricism that fits the
material well. The five Haiku Songs of
Karigane by David Kirtley are set in a way that is not always in accord
with the material but sometimes manages to deepen it. Kaoru Karigane’s haiku
follow the familiar syllabification of these three-line miniatures, and soprano
Jennifer Bird and pianist Mutsumi Moteki together extract a sense of open
sparseness from the material as Kirtley sets it. But there is rather a lot of openness here, with three of the
five settings lasting more than four minutes apiece and the others two minutes
each. The compression of thoughts that makes the haiku form so distinctive is
here subsumed within pieces that spin out long piano lines – sometimes not even
lines but singular, distinct notes that just happen to occur one after the
other – in a way quite foreign to the underlying form and intent of the poetry.
On the other hand, some of the poems’ implicit lyricism is here made explicit,
and that results in occasional instances of quite striking warmth and beauty,
even though the cycle as a whole does seem vastly overextended. Interestingly,
the shortest work on the CD, Lux Aeterna
by Timothy Kramer, produces some of the emotional impact of haiku even though
the words (sung by the Kühn
Choir conducted by Marek Vorlíček) represent
only part of a traditional Mass. Kramer’s harmonies are not consonant in an
old-fashioned sense, but neither are they self-consciously dissonant; and the
composer’s sense of the meaning of individual words leads him to emphasize them
convincingly without appearing to overdo their message. This work shows that
however up-to-date a setting may be, it is likely to have the greatest impact
if it stays as true to the spirit of the material as composers of yesteryear
strove to do.
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