Copland: Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson; Jake
Heggie: Newer Every Day; Gordon Getty: Four Dickinson Songs; Michael Tilson
Thomas: Poems of Emily Dickinson (selections). Lisa Delan, soprano;
Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille conducted by Lawrence Foster. PentaTone.
$19.99 (SACD).
Elgar: Violin Sonata in E minor; Mozart: Violin
Sonata No. 32 in B-flat, K. 454; Debussy: Violin Sonata in G minor. Dominika Dancewicz, violin;
Donald Doucet, piano. World on Wire Records. $14.99.
TORCH: Music of Ben Thomas, Brian Chin, Eric
Likkel, Erik Satie, Manual de Falla, and Igor Stravinsky. Common Tone Records. $15.
Although there are always personal
elements in music-making – and in composing – there are some recordings that
come across with a more strongly personal stamp than others. A clear example is
a new PentaTone SACD with the title, “A Certain Slant of Light” – a phrase from
a poem that begins, “There’s a certain slant of light,/ Winter afternoons,/
That oppresses, like the heft/ Of cathedral tunes.” The poem is by Emily
Dickinson and is one of 22 Dickinson settings, by four American composers, on
the disc. This is an unusual and welcome compilation, with virtually no poems repeated
on the release and with the totality of the recording revealing nearly as much
about Dickinson (1830-1886) as it does about the composers represented. Dickinson’s
voice is considered uniquely American, one of the first such voices in poetry,
yet her words and the music they inspired clearly have international resonance,
as is clear from the finely honed, sensitive performances by American soprano
Lisa Delan and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille under Lawrence Foster.
Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson
(1948/1950) shows Aaron Copland in an interesting light. The settings are
neither as accessible and tonal as his best-known works, nor as
self-consciously modern as much of his less overtly popular music: they
genuinely support Dickinson’s language
without overwhelming or commenting on it, giving Delan – who is highly
sensitive to textual nuance – plenty of chances to bring forth the poems’
emotional strength. Copland did not have access to definitive editions of
Dickinson’s poems, but this matters little in the context of the care and
sensitivity with which he set the words. That Dickinson’s work can be handled
in multiple ways is immediately clear when the disc moves on from Copland to the
five poems in Newer Every Day (2014)
by Jake Heggie (born 1961). Heggie finds acerbity, if not quite bitterness, in
Dickinson’s words, and is especially effective at underlining the thoughts and
feelings behind I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
and Fame (one of two different poems
on the disc with that title). The selection of specific poems to set is one
aspect of the strong sense of personalization here. Four Dickinson Songs (2008) by Gordon Getty (born 1933) is in some ways an extension of Getty’s The White
Election of 1981, which contains 31 Dickinson poems. The four here were
orchestrated specifically for this recording, and three of the four are about
death, including the famous Because I
Could Not Stop for Death – which Copland also set, with slightly different
words and in a version 50% longer than Getty’s. Getty engages directly with the
poems here and does not hesitate to bring out their darker elements: if
Copland’s settings are presentations of the poems, Getty’s are interpretations
of them. The final offerings here are five selections from Poems of Emily Dickinson (2001) by composer/conductor Michael
Tilson Thomas (born 1944), and again the choices say a great deal about
composer and poet alike. Thomas introduces every poem with a kind of scene-setting
orchestral opening, ranging from little more than a flourish to a kind of
miniature tone poem. The poems heard here are all short, with Thomas choosing
to keep two of them brief in presentation while expanding the other three – in
one case, The Bible, to almost five
minutes. This recording is quite clearly intended for listeners interested in
Dickinson, in modern American music, and in art songs in general – an
admittedly rarefied group. But the material is so compelling, and at the same
time so variegated, that anyone who knows Dickinson’s poetry (even a little bit
of it) will have an enriching experience by listening to it in this fascinating
context.
Context is also a matter of interest for
the performances on a new World on Wire Records release featuring the
Dancewicz-Doucet Duo. There are two sonatas here, by Elgar and Debussy, that
date from the same time (1918 and 1917 respectively) and share a number of
similar sensibilities, despite the considerable differences between the
composers’ styles. They are separated on the disc, rather oddly, by Mozart’s K.
454 sonata of 1784, a work of very different provenance and style whose
second-movement chromatic modulations look toward the future but whose overall
mood is considerably lighter than that of the other works. The selection of
these three pieces, placed in this order, quite clearly reflects the personal
preferences of the performers, who bring warmth and considerable sensitivity to
all the performances. The Elgar sonata is inward-focused and on the dark,
melancholic side, somewhat along the lines of the composer’s Cello Concerto, written a year later. It
is one of Elgar’s three minor-key chamber works of the same time period, along
with the String Quartet and Piano Quintet, and repays careful listening
and the sort of subtle, nuanced performance it receives from Dominika Dancewicz
and Donald Doucet. Debussy’s sonata is likewise one of three related works –
the others being those for cello and piano and for flute, viola and harp. But
in this case there were supposed to be six pieces: Debussy’s death halted the
creation of the full group. The violin-and-piano sonata is Debussy’s last major
work, and his performance of its première, with violinist Gaston Poulet, was
Debussy’s final public performance. Yet the work is scarcely autumnal in
quality. Interestingly, it lacks a slow movement, the emotions that would
normally be expressed through one instead emerging through the legato elements and generally long note
values of the opening Allegro vivo,
which does not come across as a traditional Allegro
at all. The second movement is
handled particularly well in this reading. An intermezzo marked Fantastique e legér, it seems to be part
scherzo, part fantasia, with Dancewicz and Doucet showing themselves quite
adept at contrasting and balancing the musical elements. Dancewicz has some very
fine spiccato here. The finale is
somewhat less engaging, not for any lack in the performance, but simply because
the music itself never quite gels, having elements of perpetuum mobile and others that seem rather tacked-on, such as the
fortissimo assertion of G major at
the end. The main characteristics of the Elgar and Debussy performances here
are warmth and understanding – and warmth predominates in the Mozart as well,
but does not fit the music quite as well. The unusually slow introduction to
the first movement, in which Mozart is also at pains to balance the
contributions of the two instruments, sets the overall tone of the performance,
which is broad and expansive and leans a bit too strongly in the direction of
Romanticism – even the comparatively playful finale has a generally serious
tone here. This reading does, however, help the Mozart fit well between the
Elgar and Debussy sonatas. Listeners interested in these specific pieces and in
hearing a duo with excellent skills at communicating – with each other and with
an audience – will gravitate to this recording.
The audience for a CD called TORCH, on the
Common Tone Records label, is harder to discern. The works here are composed or
re-composed by three of the group’s four members: Brian Chin (trumpets), Eric
Likkel (clarinets), and Ben Thomas (vibes, percussion and bandoneón). The
fourth person in TORCH is Steve Schermer (double bass). All the music on the CD
has distinct jazz elements and an improvisational feel; much of it consists of very
personal reimaginings of works by earlier composers, including Satie, de Falla
and Stravinsky. Even when the material has been through-composed, it does not
sound that way, which is part of the point: the group appears to be trying to
blur the line between traditionally organized classical music (where what
matters is what is on the page) and jazz (where the written score is only a
starting point and the performers rather than the composer decide where the
music goes and what impact it has). Many of the tracks on the CD have the usual
trying-to-be-clever titles in which contemporary composers and performers often
revel: The Surface of an Emerald, Yachtie,
Andantinish, Larghetto-Land, Lento Bash, etc. The relationship of various
pieces to their Satie/de Falla/Stravinsky inspirations is not particularly
apparent or particularly relevant: the idea here is to move beyond the original
compositions, not to dwell on or pay tribute to them. The actual playing on the
CD is of very high quality, and some of the balance among the instruments is
intriguing, with Thomas’s contributions particularly distinctive. TORCH seems to
be an experiential group that would be intriguing to see and hear in person.
But the material on this CD – although it will appeal to listeners who enjoy
some rather unusual instrumental combinations and an overall feeling of
jazziness – is not really distinctive enough to be involving beyond a comparatively
limited audience. Of course, that may be the whole point of TORCH: to reach out
to an “in crowd” of the group’s own making. Certainly the aim of bridging the
gap between traditional notions of classical music and jazz is a good one, but
it is scarcely new, and while this disc offers some pleasant listening, it is
neither inspirational not musically compelling enough to suggest that it is the
harbinger of a wide-ranging form of communication.
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