(++++) THE POWER OF QUIET

Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; Rückert-Lieder; Kindertotenlieder. Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano; Joseph Middleton, piano. Signum Classics. $17.99.

David Biedenbender: Shell and Wing; Red Vesper; all we are given we cannot hold; Solstice. Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; Garth Newel Piano Quartet with Mingzhe Wang, clarinet; Haven Trio. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.

     Among the many things that Haydn famously got right were the silences. Although we think of notes, of sound, when we think of music, those notes are never continuous, not even in the most-intense perpetuum mobile. Just as films are not continuous patterns of light and sound but intermittent ones that change too quickly for our eyes and brains to perceive the invisible interstices, music is a sound sequence punctuated constantly by lack of sound. The great composers instinctively – and sometimes deliberately – use the silences as well as the audible notes to shape their music. Mahler was a particularly acute practitioner of this aspect of composition: known for his grand climaxes, huge orchestras and massed choruses, he was often at his most impressive when using the orchestra as a kind of expanded chamber group and – within his very carefully balanced sectional writing – employing silence so effectively as to make it coequal with sound. The best Mahler interpretations shape the silence as well as the notes – again, sometimes instinctively and sometimes deliberately. Certainly Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton expertly balance sound and silence on a new Signum Classics release featuring three Mahler song cycles in their voice-and-piano versions. Normally heard as voice-and-orchestra works, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Rückert-Lieder and Kindertotenlieder are surprisingly effective in this form – in some ways even more effective than in orchestral guise, just as black-and-white photos can sometimes reveal details and balances that are harder to see and interpret in their splashier color versions. A great deal of the excellence of this recording is the result of the exceptional quality of the collaboration of these artists. Connolly has a rich, warm, expressive voice that is ideally suited to the general darkness, sometimes bordering on despair, that permeates these cycles. And Middleton is a truly exceptional accompanist, indulging not only in partnership with Connolly but also in his own highly meaningful interpretations of piano sections in which the voice is absent – as in the quiet endings of several of the songs, when the piano’s descent into eventual silence is a commentary on and buttress for the emotions communicated by the voice. Kindertotenlieder, that dark but somehow hopeful five-song cycle delving into abyssal grief, fares perhaps the best of these three groupings in this reading: Connolly dwells on just the right words, contrasting and balancing the emotions to perfection, while Middleton apparently effortlessly underlines the foundational sorrow of the music even as he picks out salient points of light that struggle, throughout the cycle, to illuminate themselves. The excellence of performance also pervades the five Rückert-Lieder, most emphatically so in the two longest songs, the dour Um Mitternacht and the thoughtful and thought-provoking Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. As for Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, it too gets a distinguished reading here, although in this four-song cycle the orchestral version really is preferable – if only because it is hard not to hear the way Mahler later used some of the song settings in symphonic guise. Besides, the relentlessly upbeat first portion of Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld benefits from more instrumental brightness than a pianist, even one as skilled as Middleton, can provide. Be that as it may, the sensitivity and care with which Connolly and Middleton present all these songs are remarkable, and their sure understanding of the way the music rises from silence and returns to it – sometimes repeatedly – results in a recording that is deeply meaningful and moving from start to finish.

     Mahler tended to write or rewrite the words he set to music – he wrote all of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – but he did use others’ poetry as a starting point, with Friedrich Rückert the source of the other material on the Connolly/Middleton disc. Contemporary composer David Biedenbender (born 1984) has a favorite poet of his own: Robert Fanning (born 1970), whose words are the source for two of the four works on a new recording from Blue Griffin. Shell and Wing (2018), a two-poem set, is essentially a sociopolitical work about the difficulty of raising children in a violent world. It in no way compares to Kindertotenlieder either in expressivity or in the intensity of its feelings, but is effective as a 21^st-century attempt to grapple with threats to children that are modern rather than those of earlier, pre-antibiotic times. Biedenbender’s work’s concept involves a parental voice followed by a child’s, and the composer engages in some deliberate recollections and stretchings of Schumann that are less than transparent. Shell tries rather too hard to show intense parental concern while using a modern musical idiom; Wing, which initially is quiet and almost glassy in sound, conveys something of the evanescence of childhood before the voice enters about two minutes in – after which the declamatory delivery of the words becomes anything but childlike and seems somewhat forced. The other Fanning-based work here is all we are given we cannot hold (2022), which uses the affectation of a title with no capital letters. It is a seven-song cycle that runs almost half an hour and focuses on small quotidian events that Biedenbender sees as crucial to remember when raising children. The art-song elements are less pronounced here than in Shell and Wing, making this cycle more accessible despite turns of phrase that are scarcely the stuff of most people’s everyday lives, thoughts or conversations. The topics are wide-ranging and not what listeners will necessarily expect in a work with this intent: One and a Half Miles Away from Dying, for example. There is at times an uneasiness bordering on discordance in the contrast between the verbiage and its instrumental support. Ultimately, the cycle has some touching moments and some trenchant ones, but as a whole it is not entirely convincing – and the persistence of a single style of vocal delivery makes it seem even longer than it is. The personal elements affecting Biedenbender’s life actually come through more effectively in Red Vesper (2014), a brief instrumental work (heard here on clarinet, violin, cello and piano) that gets the silences and near-silences right in its first portion (as does the song Wing) and that later becomes, if not exactly prayerful, more emotionally involving as its volume increases and the instruments sound as if they are seeking something of greater meaning and higher value – within a thoroughly modern set of rhythms and dissonances. The other instrumental piece on this disc, Solstice (2018), is an interesting calibration of the four seasons, starting with Summer. This first movement is only mildly successful in paying homage to insect sounds – they are less grating than Biedenbender makes them out to be – but Autumn is an interesting mixture of discordant recollections with anticipatory frigidity that is well-communicated in the upper ranges of the piano. This movement fades gradually into oblivion – another example of well-thought-out use of silence. Winter is filled with stasis, in some ways a modern update of Vivaldi’s handling of the season – and the piece is also a recollection of and commentary on Ives’ The Unanswered Question, yet another work whose final fadeaway shows the importance of quiet in a sonic landscape (or starscape). Biedenbender ends with Spring, which emerges from silence into an increasingly bright, energetic and bouncily jazzlike dance. All the movements go on a bit too long after they make their points – the “fiddling” elements of Spring, for instance, become irritating after a while. But the movements’ individual sections are often interesting, and this (+++) CD offers listeners some effective contemporary musical thinking in which, it turns out, the purely instrumental material is more successful than the song cycles at conveying Biedenbender’s emotive intentions.