(+++) VOICES, MASSED AND SINGLE

Margaret Bonds: Credo; Simon Bore the Cross. Janinah Burnett, soprano; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone; The Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra conducted by Malcolm J. Merriweather. AVIE. $17.99.

Henriëtte Bosmans: Three Songs; Élisabeth Classe: 4 Mèlodies; Irène Fuerison: Les Heures claires, Les Heures d’après-midi, Les Heures du soir; Nadia Boulanger & Raoul Pugno: Les Heures claires—Nos. 1, 3, 4, 6; Marion Bauer: Four Poems. Susan Narucki, soprano; Donald Berman, piano. AVIE. $17.99.

     The human voice has communicative and emotive capabilities of different types when heard in grouped form, on the one hand, and as a solo, on the other. Composers tend to be instinctively sensitive to the differing capabilities of choruses and individuals, with choral compositions often used to bring forth grand, world-spanning and world-affecting themes, while single-voice creations often focus on highly personal emotions and inward-looking contemplative thoughts. The differences can be quite apparent in familiar music – the choral finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, say, compared with Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin – but audiences will encounter them as well in less-known works, and even in world première recordings, such as those on two new AVIE releases. The first of these CDs features two choral works by Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), both with avowedly religious themes but both using words modified in significant ways from more-typical treatments of the Catholic Mass and the life of Christ. Bonds’ Credo uses a text by W.E.B. Du Bois (as edited by Rollo Dilworth) that asserts the special character and importance of “the Negro Race,” as the words have it. In fact, of the seven movements of this Credo, six have titles that begin with the words “I believe,” but the second has an extra-emphatic title: “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race.” The other elements of belief focus, in this order, on God, Pride of Race, the Devil, the Prince of Peace, Liberty, and Patience – a particularly telling sequence that produces a feeling quite different from that of the standard Credo in Unum Deum and what typically follows it. The music, sensitively and effectively presented by the Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra under Malcolm J. Merriweather, is by turns assertive, passionate, lyrical, and hopeful, and it draws quite clearly on spirituals and other African-American-derived musical forms. The plea for “a kingdom of beauty and love,” called for by the bass-baritone soloist and contrasted to the choral elements of Credo, is all the more affecting in the way it personalizes verbiage that is otherwise societal in scope and broad in engagement. The same stylistic blending, the same effective juxtaposition of individual and choral material, is found throughout Simon Bore the Cross, which uses texts by Langston Hughes as edited and arranged by Merriweather. Here it is left to the soprano soloist, singing as Mary, to ask plaintively for the identity of the man who helps Jesus carry the cross, while the full chorus identifies him to Mary as Simon of Cyrene, a “dark man” who “has come to share [Jesus’] heavy load,” because “black men will share the pain of the cross.” Here as in Credo, Bonds effectively knits together large and well-known thematic concepts with ones that are made more intimate, first, for an audience of “the Negro Race,” and, second, for individual members of that audience and that race. This is music intended to uplift and acclaim a specific downtrodden group, yet it is notably and refreshingly free of claims of victimization and demands for redress. These are works permeated by faith, both in the texts and in the music, and the spiritual uplift provided through the words and music – and through these highly effective performances – offers hope for a promise of healing that speaks as clearly and impressively today as it did when Bonds wrote these pieces in the 1960s.

     The personal elements are deeper and without reference to specific racial concerns in a series of mostly French-language works created decades before Bonds’ pieces by little-known composers. Part of the inward-looking nature of these pieces stems from the lyrics, part from the music – and an important part derives from the composers’ decision to use a single voice with piano, a time-honored art-song tradition, to communicate with listeners. The disc actually opens and closes with non-French works, starting with songs by Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952) and concluding with ones by an American, Marion Bauer (1882-1955). Bosmans’ three songs, which date to 1947, have titles that translate as The Island, In the Rain, and Draw the heavens in the sand of the sea, and are introspective, alienated and resigned (“All these things have been and…they have gone, they have left no trace” – a reflection in its own way of Shelley’s Ozymandias). Bauer’s English-language Four Poems, here in a world première recording, were written earlier (1924) and have a more pastoral feeling about them, and a somewhat more hopeful (perhaps naïvely hopeful) air: “But they who shared with me my life’s adventure…somewhere they with songs are building/ Golden towers more beautiful than my own.” Between these musical bookends, whose feelings Susan Narucki presents with just the right emotional balance, are works drawn in large part from the works of Belgian symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916). The 4 Mélodies by Elisabeth Claisse (dates unknown) were written in 1922-1923 and include a wide range of feelings, from interpersonal difficulties to a genuinely moving (verbally and musically) exploration of what it feels like to be truly poor. Next is the world première recording of an extended work from 1918 by Irène Fuerison (1875-1931), a Belgian composer here presenting French texts by Verhaeren that focus on love as a long-enduring emotion that feeds on and grows past youthful passion to become, at the end of life, a promise to “preserve so fiery a love for you/ that the other dead will feel its glow.” Narucki’s handling of this cycle is particularly compelling, and Donald Berman, a fine accompanist throughout the disc, here uses the piano part to especially telling effect. The only composer on the CD with whom audiences will likely be familiar is Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), who in 1909 created an eight-song cycle called Les Heures claires with her onetime Paris Conservatory teacher, Raoul Pugno (1852-1914). Unfortunately, only four of the songs are presented here – the full cycle would have provided better balance to the disc, since these compositions are more transparent than the other works on the CD, more balanced and elegant. The contrast between this version of Vous m’avez dit and the one to the same poem by Fuerison is especially intriguing. The expressiveness of all these songs, of all these composers, is communicated with considerable skill thanks to the creators’ decision to use a single voice to present the various texts – and thanks to the ability of Narucki and Berman to extract the full, deeply personal elements of both the words and the music.