(++++) ACROSS THE CENTURIES

When We Were Very Young: Centenary Facsimile Edition. By A.A. Milne. Decorations by E.H. Shepherd. Farshore/HarperCollins. $35.

     Some children’s literature is, if not eternal, certainly very long-lasting, and likely to remain so. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books fall into that category – but some adults may be surprised to learn that the two Pooh-focused story collections, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, were not where Milne introduced the always-amiable “bear of little brain” with a name taken from the one Milne’s real-world son, Christopher Robin, bestowed upon his real-world stuffed bear. Pooh Bear was in fact introduced in the poetry collection When We Were Very Young, and that book has now been around for a full century – making it probably inevitable that a keepsake volume would emerge.

     It is here now, and this “centenary facsimile edition” is in fact a wonderful piece of Pooh memorabilia for adults who grew up loving Pooh and have enjoyed passing along his stories (whether in Milne’s versions or in others, notably the animated ones from Disney) to new generations. It is worth emphasizing the point that this book is clearly not an offering for kids: unless a contemporary child is a tremendous lover of both Pooh and old-fashioned ink-on-paper stories, the care with which this lovely edition of When We Were Very Young was produced will go unnoticed and unappreciated. Not to mention potentially damaged: the book itself, with its gilded page tops and the elegant slipcase into which it fits, is designed from the start as a collector’s item, one that it is quite fine to read with suitable care but not one to be tossed about hither and thither and treated as if it is just another book for kids.

     The original publication date of When We Were Very Young was November 6, 1924, and the “centenary facsimile edition” makes no attempt to provide anything beyond what was in Milne’s book on that date. Notably, the illustrations by E.H. Shepherd, so charmingly labeled “decorations,” are the original black-line ones, not the much-more-familiar colored ones into which Shepherd’s creations have morphed over the years, courtesy of various colorists. Also, there is no attempt to update, explain or provide commentary on any of the poems in the book, only one of which is actually about Pooh – where he is called “our Teddy Bear,” “Teddy,” and “Mr. Edward Bear.” Pooh, never so named, does show up elsewhere in the book’s illustrations, but none of the other poems is actually about him. And the poems are quite unapologetically British: a bat refers to a cricket bat, the many references to money deal with shillings and pence (this was long before decimalisation), and it does not hurt to know what a porringer is.

     There are poems here reminiscent of the work of Lewis Carroll – “The Dormouse and the Doctor,” for example. And there are some that are real-world scenes, with Milne himself appearing with Christopher Robin beside him: “Sand-Between-the-Toes.” And there are a few with an underlying thoughtfulness that remains suggestive, 100 years after their creation, of family life in the 1920s: “The Wrong House,” with its not-entirely-lighthearted refrain of contemplation, “It isn’t like a house at all.”

     There is also something here that adults enjoying this lovely re-creation of When We Were Very Young are likely to find quite surprising indeed. It appears at the book’s very beginning, in the short introduction called “Just Before We Begin,” wherein Milne addresses readers directly and opens with a reference to William Wordsworth, an altogether different sort of poet whose name will likely be quite unknown to young children just encountering Milne’s writing. It is not the Wordsworth comment that will bring adults up short, however, but the discovery in this introductory matter of the name Pooh. Yes, here is Pooh – but the name is not attached to Mr. Edward Bear by any means, being instead the moniker that Christopher Robin has assigned to…a swan. And the whole “Pooh” name makes sense as a British-swan reference, since “if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying ‘Pooh!’ to show how little you wanted him.” And there, resplendent in its nicely gold-edged binding and slipcased form, you have the very earliest Pooh-ness of all, before “Pooh” became a term of endearment and brought us where we are now, a century later.

     Of course, it is not necessary to possess the “centenary facsimile edition” of When We Were Very Young to have the introductory material in which the word Pooh appears – any complete version of the book contains the introduction – but there is something extra-special about having this small piece of history in a form quite similar to the one it possessed before the book, and the bear within it, became small pieces of history. Nostalgia runs thick here; indeed, it almost seems as if the “we” in When We Were Very Young refers not only to Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996) and by extension to his father A.A. (Alan Alexander) (1882-1956), but also to any modern grown-up fortunate enough to encounter this memorable memorial edition and use it to reminisce, however briefly, about a childhood now faded, hopefully with a certain degree of gentility, into once-upon-a-time.

(++++) PIANISM OF DISTINCTION

Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-3. Tzimon Barto, piano; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Capriccio. $21.99 (2 CDs).

Idil Biret Solo Edition, Volume 12: Mussorgsky—Pictures at an Exhibition; Glazunov—Piano Sonata No. 2; Balakirev: Islamey. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $19.99.

Idil Biret Solo Edition, Volume 13: Schubert—Piano Sonata in A, D. 664; Piano Sonata in F minor, D. 625; Impromptu in G-flat, D. 899; Wanderer Fantasy, D. 760. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $19.99.

     The vast communicative power of the piano gives composers a virtually infinite palette of expressive capabilities, allowing them to produce moods and musical stories of pretty much every type – and it gives performers an uncountable number of ways to, in their turn, interpret what composers were trying to put across to listeners by employing piano writing and techniques of all sorts. Many pianists seem to take complex and difficult music for their instrument as a sort of personal challenge to be surmounted – and when they add understanding of the music to their existing technical skill, the results can be exhilarating. That is the case with Tzimon Barto’s interpretations of the three Bartók piano concertos, as thorny a trio of piano-and-orchestra works as will be found anywhere in the repertoire. The assertiveness and intensity of these concertos, especially the first two, are of such a high degree as to be off-putting to many pianists and many audiences: the music is not easily “listenable” or accessible in a traditional sense. Barto’s vaguely European-sounding name may make it seem as if his ethnic heritage helps him connect with Bartók’s music, but this is scarcely the case: Barto was born in Florida and named Johnny Barto Smith Jr. until a teacher at Juilliard, Adele Marcus, rechristened him. There may, however, be something in Barto’s wide-ranging interests to help explain his affinity for the Bartók concertos: Bartók was a late bloomer musically and as interested in folk music as in anything traditionally classical, while Barto is a multilingual novelist and poet as well as a concert pianist – and was discovered by Christoph Eschenbach (born Christoph Ringmann) in 1988, when Barto was 25 (and had already been learning and making music for 20 years). Whatever the interesting intersections of personal and performing life may be, the fact is that Barto’s handling of the three Bartók piano concertos, with Eschenbach conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, is outstanding throughout. The Stravinskian elements in the first concerto come through as clearly as do the work’s obsessive patterns and the extreme difficulty of the music not only for the soloist but also for the orchestra. At the distance of nearly a century (the concerto dates to 1926), the concerto seems very much to be music of its time, an era that produced musique concrète, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2, and much more along similar mechanistic lines. Barto manages to convey the intensity of the music without thundering along to too great an extent, and he and Eschenbach even find some rhythmic melodiousness in the piece here and there. In the second concerto (1930), matters are somewhat  easier for the orchestra if not for the pianist, and the work is structurally interesting – no strings in the first movement, for example. Here too Barto and Eschenbach look for and occasionally find expressiveness, primarily in the second movement but even in the outer ones – although the finale has exclamatory intensity that catches the ear immediately and never lets go. And then, on a separate Capriccio CD – for reasons of timing but seeming as if the separation could be content-related – there is the third concerto (1945), in which non-Romantic but nevertheless lyrical and expressive material comes to the fore, with Barto and Eschenbach skillfully bringing out the music’s frequent feelings of serenity and the ways in which it reflects not Stravinsky but Ravel. There is darkness here, for sure, but it is not insistent darkness, seeming more like the natural progress of day into night than anything imposed through human-made drama or technology. Less virtuosic than the first two concertos, the third is easier on an audience’s ears but no less imbued with Bartók’s rhythmic and harmonic structural concerns. It fits remarkably well with the first two concertos as performed here, even as it stands apart from them. Barto and Eschenbach have thoroughly mastered this music and have produced a recording that repays repeated listening very well indeed.

     The pianism is quite different but equally fine, the music more familiar but equally engaging, in the two latest releases in the long-running Idil Biret Solo Edition series from IBA. This sequence showcases recent performances by the Turkish pianist: Volume 13 dates to 2016, Volume 12 to 2017 except for a 1993 performance of Balakirev’s Islamey. One thing that is clear is that Biret (born 1941) is as exceptional an artist in the 21^st century as she was in the 20^th (the Idil Biret Archive Edition offers earlier performances). Biret has thoroughly mastered works of all sorts and consistently puts her considerable pianistic prowess at the service of thoughtful, carefully considered performances that, more often than not, bring out the emotional kernels as well as the technical intricacies of the music. The 12^th volume of the Idil Biret Solo Edition focuses on music of Russia, for which Biret had a longstanding affinity. The highlight here is the Glazunov sonata (1901), an E minor work that gives Biret a perfect opportunity to place her technique at the service of music of dark complexity and very intense pianistic demands. The passionate lushness of the first movement comes through particularly well here, while the almost impossibly difficult second movement seems not to give Biret any pause at all. The overall effect of the music is one of expressive intensity, its complexity subsumed within its communicative feelings. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is somewhat less successful, all in all. Played elegantly and with precision, it periodically lapses into a kind of formulaic presentation that misses some of the work’s underlying emotions: the chicks in their shells are not especially lively, Baba Yaga is by no means scary as she swoops about in her mortar, and the concluding Great Gate at Kiev is statuesque but lacks some of the grandeur it possesses in other performances. The whole performance is a bit downplayed – a reasonable alternative to the over-the-top readings this music sometimes receives, but perhaps a tad too reasonable. As for Islamey, here Biret is in very fine form, delivering the work’s rhythms and colors to good effect throughout and producing a sense of both the exotic and the celebratory.

     Volume 13 of the Idil Biret Solo Edition features music that is very different indeed, and here Biret is fully in an expressive idiom to which she seems to gravitate unerringly. The two Schubert sonatas flow with beauty and endless thematic creativity throughout, with Biret choosing the tempo for every movement and every section of a movement carefully and with an eye (and an ear) for how each part of each sonata fits into the whole. The sonata D. 664 (1819) is sweetly lyrical and upbeat throughout, but the lack of some later sonatas’ profundity is irrelevant in Biret’s performance, where all is sunny and pleasant except when brief periods of poignancy appear and serve mainly to highlight the generally optimistic feelings everywhere else. The sonata D. 625 (1818) was left incomplete (leaving music unfinished was a Schubert habit throughout his life) and contrasts strongly with D. 664. The F minor sonata, as befits its home key, is intense, often turbulent, and varies in pianistic demands between very lean sections and much fuller ones. Biret explores the sonata’s many moods effectively and manages to treat it as a fully thought-through work – except for one unfortunate decision that mars her otherwise fine performance. There is an Adagio in D-flat, D. 505, that is widely accepted as this sonata’s second movement – but Biret does not play it, giving the sonata instead as a three-movement work without a slow movement. That serves the music poorly, and there was plenty of room on this CD to include D. 505 by simply omitting the Impromptu in G-flat, D. 899, which is given here after the two sonatas and is pleasant enough but wholly unnecessary in this context. The good news, though, is that after this short piece, Biret is heard in the Wanderer Fantasy, and her performance is so good that it thoroughly redeems the less-than-thoughtful decision regarding D. 625. The fantasy, D. 760 (1822), is very technically demanding, perhaps more so than any other piano work by Schubert – but as in so many other instances, Biret has no apparent difficulty with its technical complexities, putting them at the service of a very expressive and emotionally convincing interpretation. The work combines elements of sonata and theme-and-variations forms, and it is to Biret’s credit that she explores both of those elements thoroughly while still seeing the piece as a whole, within which the competing structural designs complement each other in the service of high emotive appeal. This performance clearly shows how thoroughly Biret continues to plumb the depths of music she has performed for decades, bringing to the fore her considerable understanding of the composers’ intentions and using her own high level of technique at the service of the music, in the most convincing way possible.

(+++) BYWAYS WORTH A VISIT

Offenbach: Maître Péronilla. Véronique Gens, Antoinette Dennefeld, Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Anaïs Constans, Diana Axentii, Éric Huchet, Tassis Christoyannis, François Piolino, Patrick Kabongo, Loïc Félix, Yoann Dubruque, Matthieu Lécroart, Raphaël Brémard, Jérôme Boutillier, Philippe-Nicolas Martin, Antoine Philippot; Chœur de Radio France and Orchestre National de France conducted by Markus Poschner. Bru Zane. $42.99 (2 CDs).

Vieuxtemps: Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12; Franck: Andantino quietoso; Mélancolie; Fauré: Berceuse, Op. 16; Saint-Saëns: Élegie, Op. 143; Saint-Saëns/Ysaÿe: Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse. Bruno Monteiro, violin; João Paulo Santos, piano. Et’cetera Records. $15.

Christopher Tyler Nickel: Concerto for Piccolo; Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas. Sarah Jackson, piccolo; Oliver de Clercq, Laurel Spencer, Valerie Whitney and Holly Bryan, Wagner tubas; Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Clyde Mitchell. AVIE. $19.99.

     Stage works were all the rage in 19^th-century France, with tremendous competition among composers and performing venues not only in the high-minded and serious sphere of opera but also in the decidedly lighter-hearted and often modestly risqué field of operetta. Offenbach was by no means the highly dominant figure in lighter music in his lifetime that he appears to be retrospectively, certainly not after the Franco-Prussian  War (1870-71) changed the face of Europe and not coincidentally brought Offenbach into disrepute and bankruptcy because of his German birth and connections to the Second Empire. The nature of Offenbach’s music changed after 1871, moving more toward the lyricism and warmth of opéra-comique and away from his stock-in-trade opéra-bouffe, with its ever-present slapstick and on-stage confusion. Offenbach was so prolific that a great many of his 100-or-so stage works remain quite obscure – for a variety of reasons, only very rarely involving the quality of the music. One of the most interesting of these from the postwar years is Maître Péronilla, a very late work (1878) for which Offenbach himself wrote the libretto. In line with its stated aim to rediscover and explore French musical heritage from 1780 to 1920, Palazetto Bru Zane has assembled, in its usual lovely book-and-CD packaging, a thoroughly winning account of Maître Péronilla from a June 2019 performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The story involves a scheme through which “elderly” aunt Léona (age 39, but insisting repeatedly that she is 29) tries to prevent the 19-year-old Manoëla from marrying the love of her life, Alvarès, whom Léona wants for herself. Thanks to some clever machinations and a hard-of-hearing notary, Manoëla ends up inadvertently and scandalously married both to Alvarès and to the old, ugly and perpetually befuddled Don Guardona (the work was originally going to be called Les Deux Maris de Manoëla, but that seemed a bit too scandalous). Through the courtroom artistry of the title character, who is Manoëla’s father – a famous maker of chocolate and a onetime practicing lawyer – everything is sorted out in the end, with Alvarès getting Manoëla and Léona hooking up, not unwillingly, with Guardona. Offenbach’s libretto is not particularly coherent, especially in the initial setup of the premise, and it is hard to escape the feeling that he focused much less on the story than on the chance to create various thoroughly winning songs that tend to have little or nothing to do with advancing the dramatic action (hence the comparatively chilly reception of Maître Péronilla in its own era, when it played only 50 times, and its near-total obscurity afterwards). Be all that as it may, the recording led by Markus Poschner gives the work as much impetus as it is likely ever to have. Poschner paces the numbers very well, keeping the action moving (albeit occasionally at the expense of some of the lyricism) and facilitating the interplay among the many characters (20 or so separate roles – another likely reason for the piece’s obscurity). The really wonderful musical numbers include a Malagueña solo that was the work’s biggest hit by far; Péronilla’s Couplets du Chocolat, extolling the virtues of being a chocolate-maker rather than a lawyer; and the waltz from the second-act finale, Mon coeur, prenons courage, fault-il gémir toujours! The best singing here comes from Antoinette Dennefeld as Frimouskino, the friend of Manoëla and Alvarès whose machinations bring about the happy ending. But other voices are quite fine as well. Anaïs Constans is suitably naïve if a touch heavy as Manoëla, Chantal Santon-Jeffery sings well as Alvarès despite a voice that is slightly pinched at the top, Véronique Gens is suitably unpleasant (in a comic way) as Léona, and Éric Huchet handles the title role with aplomb. Although casting complexities and a less-than-effective libretto make further revivals of Maître Péronilla unlikely, the first-rate music and the chance to hear the ways in which Offenbach continued to develop his art toward the end of his career and life make this recording very much worth having and this stage work very much worth experiencing.

     The French composer most focused on showing the continuing validity of non-stage music in the 19^th century was Camille Saint-Saëns, and there was some intriguing instrumental focus in French-speaking Belgium as well. Much of this music, like much of Offenbach’s, remains obscure today – and as a result is well worth exploring by interested performers and audiences alike. An especially pleasant rediscovery is the Grande Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op. 12, by Belgian violinist/composer Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881), who nowadays is best-known for turning Beethoven’s Violin Concerto into part of the standard repertoire through his tireless advocacy of the music. Vieuxtemps, although a considerable virtuoso in his own right, focused more on lyricism than fireworks in his music – in fact, in string quartets he preferred to play the viola, whose sumptuous sound and warmth led him to write a viola sonata that is now one of his few fairly well-known works. Much less familiar is this Grande Sonata, whose combination of lyrical beauties, majesty and patient thematic development comes through to excellent effect in a very well-balanced and thoughtfully conceived performance by Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos. Charm and grace pervade the second-movement Scherzo, which Monteiro and Santos handle with just the right degree of delicacy, but the real gem of the sonata is its third-movement Largo, ma non troppo, a movement whose initial hymnlike theme eventually builds toward a radiantly intense climax offering near-religious fervor. After this, the well-balanced finale is notable for not containing over-the-top elements, and it is very much to Monteiro’s credit that he does not overplay the music or try to turn it into any sort of display piece: this movement’s success lies in elegance, not fireworks. Vieuxtemps’ 45-minute sonata takes up most of a new Et’cetera Records disc, with the balance of the CD given over to shorter works that in many cases are just as neglected as the Grande Sonata, and just as undeservedly. Franck’s Andante quietoso features an elegiac violin melody interacting with a regular bass-line piano pulse in an attractive salon-music idiom. Franck wrote it in 1843, when he was 21, for himself and his violinist brother to perform in, yes, salons, and its poise and pacing look forward to later Franck works – including Mélancolie, written in the mid-1880s but not published until 1911, long after Franck’s death. This is essentially a solfège exercise, and a very effective one as heard on this disc. Much better-known is Fauré’s Berceuse, Op. 16, although its original violin-and-piano version (specifying violin con sordino) is less familiar nowadays than the composer’s later one for violin and orchestra. This little work is quite popular and has been arranged for many instruments, but Monteiro and Santos make a strong case for its original scoring, which does not dispel its air of conventionality but which allows for an attractive presentation of its soft dynamics and pleasantly rocking accompaniment. Saint-Saëns is present as well on this nicely programmed CD. His late (1915) Élegie – actually the first of two, the second dating to 1920 – is not often heard, having a rather unsettled atmosphere because of its tonal ambiguity and ongoing modulations. It has the feeling of improvisation about it, which Monteiro and Santos communicate effectively. This recording then ends with Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse, the only outright tour de force on the CD. Violinist/composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) here arranged the last of Saint-Saëns’ 1877 Six Études pour piano, Op. 52, which is really not much like a waltz (its title notwithstanding). The work, which is undanceably quick, is full of bravura writing in which Monteiro and Santos revel as they bring this wide-ranging yet focused recital to a fully satisfying conclusion.

     Of course, it is not necessary to return to the 19^th century or even the 20^th to find music that is off the beaten path but that is nevertheless worth exploring – in some cases precisely because it is off the beaten path. A new AVIE disc featuring very recent works by Christopher Tyler Nickel (born 1978) is a short CD – just 45 minutes – but one that provides plenty of sonic engagement and a modicum of thoughtfulness in the creation of two works featuring solo instruments that are rarely heard front-and-center. Nickel’s skill as a film composer is evident in the way he paces and maintains the aural attractiveness of his 2022 Concerto for Piccolo, commissioned by the soloist and conductor who offer it here. The difficulty of setting a high-pitched and usually quiet instrument against a full orchestral complement is adeptly handled by Nickel by having much of the solo part take place against portions of the ensemble rather than the entire Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra. This works somewhat better in the slow central movement than in the more-angular, more-emphatic opening one. The dancelike but, as with Saint-Saëns’ Étude en forme de Valse, undanceable finale pulls the piccolo into its highest register, setting it against brass exclamations in a way that produces an effect akin to that of a piano being played at the bottom and top of the keyboard simultaneously. The piercing piccolo cadenza near the movement’s end contrasts with the emphatic tutti that concludes a work worth hearing once but perhaps not a great deal more often. The 2021 Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is something quite different. Wagner tubas, four-valve brass instruments that combine tuba and French horn elements and are actually closer to horns than tubas in sound, are well-known in Der Ring des Nibelungen, for which they were created, but otherwise rarely heard – and never as a solo quartet, as they are in Nickel’s work. Much less frantic than the piccolo concerto and filled with a level of lyricism not often found in Nickel’s music, the Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas may put listeners in mind of Schumann’s 1849 Concerto for Four Wagner Tubas is a more-interesting work than the Concerto for Piccolo, and both will certainly be attractive to performers on the respective solo instruments. But this (+++) CD is likely to have little staying power for listeners in general: it contains intriguing experiments that are intellectually engaging, but not much that is likely to be musically nourishing over the longer term.

(+++) SOUNDS FOR ALL SEASONS

A Lullaby Carol: Christmas at Christ Church. Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, conducted by Steven Grahl. AVIE. $19.99.

Lee R. Kesselman: Vocal Music. Haven Trio (Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; Kimberly Cole Loevano, clarinet; Midori Kogo, piano); Allison Rich, cello. Blue Griffin Records. $15.99.

Cantus: Alone Together. Signum Classics. $17.99.

     Despite the seasonality of Christmas, its underlying messages of wonder and hope transcend any specific time of year, and even penetrate the thoughts of many who may look for routes to salvation that differ from those based on Christ. Notwithstanding the tremendous commercialism that has come to pervade the season, Christmas remains a time for reflection, beauty and thoughtfulness for a great many people – and music, both old and new, is a major element of it. The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, does a particularly lovely job of communicating the sacred underpinning of the holiday on an AVIE recording called A Lullaby Carol – a title reflecting such contents as Lullay, lullay, litel child by David Maw (born 1967), O nata lux by conductor Steven Grahl (born 1979), and the spiritual Glory to the newborn King as arranged by Robert L. Morris (born 1941). Maw’s work is surprisingly dissonant despite the beauty of the vocal blending; Grahl’s has the flavor of plainchant; and the Morris arrangement effectively sets different vocal ranges as well as chordal and melodic elements against and beside each other. These three works and the 18 others here show just how wide a variety of music can be used to express the feelings underlying the Christmas season. And the musical selections, although mostly written comparatively recently by such composers as William Walton and Peter Warlock, also include some traditional material such as Silent night! Holy night! (arguably the most beautiful Christmas song of all) and Maw’s arrangements of I Saw Three Ships and Away in a Manger. It is in this more-familiar material that the choir shows its fully devotional side. The prayerful quality, for example, is brought to the fore in Silent night! Holy night! The simple beauty of Away in a Manger – which includes accompaniment on organ (played by Benjamin Sheen) – is inspirational. And Sheen is also heard in the organ solo Improvisation on Adeste, fidelis by Francis Pott (born 1957), a piece that strays rather far from the work known in English as Oh come all ye faithful but that shows to what extent music of Christmastime can go beyond the slow-paced homophony so often associated with carols. Like all releases focused on this specific time of year, this one is unlikely to be played repeatedly after the Christmas season is over. But the beauty of the singing and depth of expressiveness of the music will make its annual reappearance in listeners’ homes likely.

     Contemporary vocal music tends to reach out to a narrower audience than do seasonal Christmas works – and composers generally want to make points that have meaning at any time, not just in specific seasons. The Blue Griffin Records collection of world premières written for and performed by the trio known as Haven is a case in point. Lee R. Kesselman (born 1951) draws on a variety of sources for these seven works, two of which are song cycles. He looks back to some earlier composers, sets some lyrics from non-Western sources, and also produces music in which he is both lyricist and composer. Thus, Piangerò (2012) is loosely based on music from Handel’s Giulio Cesare but is thoroughly contemporary in harmonic and declamatory style. I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise is Kesselman’s 2018 arrangement of the Gershwin song – and is effective precisely because it pays close attention to the original and does not try to force it into an entirely new form or guise. Make Me a Willow Cabin (2014) is entirely Kesselman’s own music, but the words are Shakespeare’s, from Twelfth Night; and the accompaniment, which starts out as both perky and dissonant before becoming slower and serious and still dissonant, is largely at odds with the lyrics (for example, multiple repetitions of “my soul” make the point less rather than more effective). The words for How I Hate This Room (2007) are scarcely Shakespearean – they are by James Tucker – but Kesselman’s style fits better with this more-modern, more-prosaic and less-poetic verbiage. As for influences from abroad, the CD opens with Kesselman’s 2018 arrangement of the Japanese folksong Sakura, handled with the same sensitivity accorded Gershwin, and then offers the eight-movement Ashes & Dreams (2016) based on Japanese poetry. A societal point underlies this work – it alternates haiku, traditionally written by men, with waka, traditionally written by women. From a musical standpoint, the poised and graceful, wordless Prelude introduces items that are indeed made to sound different in accompaniment based on their form, but that all share a certain predisposition to push the voice in ways that reduce, sometimes greatly, any elegance inherent in the original poetry. The other song cycle here, which has both words and music by Kesselman, is Would That Loving Were Enough (2021). It includes four explorations of contemporary personal issues that are of little consequence objectively but that loom large in many relationships. It strives for significance and meaningfulness but comes across as more assertive than convincing. Kesselman does have rather wide-ranging interests that may make at least some works on this disc attractive to listeners interested in modern art songs.

     There are some world premières as well on a new Signum Classics CD featuring the low-voice vocal ensemble Cantus: seven of these 19 works have not been recorded before. The theme stated as the disc’s title, Alone Together, is a typical one for contemporary composers – Kesselman’s How I Hate This Room and Would That Loving Were Enough fit right into it – but Cantus chooses to illustrate the concept with works as different as Beethoven’s Gesang der Mönche, Simon and Garfunkel’s A Most Peculiar Man (which immediately follows the Beethoven), and those seven first recordings (four by Libby Larsen and one each by Gabriel Kahane, Jeff Beal and Rosephanye Powell). The Larsen items – actually parts of a multi-movement work interpolated within and among the various other pieces here – are specifically about technology and the ways in which it both facilitates connection and undermines it. The other pieces on the disc connect to the overall theme, and to each other, in a variety of ways, some more apparent than others. What is true throughout, even when the concept overreaches and somewhat undermines its ideas through over-sincerity, is that Cantus is a very fine singing ensemble. Sharon Durant’s Chinese Proverb is practically whispered at times, but always with emotional impact; the Lennon/McCartney She’s Leaving Home is jauntier than the Beatles made it and for that reason more pointed in its message; Arcade Fire’s Deep Blue effectively sets foreground narration against a kind of sound-cloud background that highlights the words’ pathos to good effect; Saint-Saëns’ Calme des Nuits (arranged by Chris Foss) sounds forth as a choral hymn blended with beauty; and so on, and on. Whether the disc as a whole fully reflects its title is almost immaterial – not to Cantus, certainly, but to the audience, since the individual components of the recording are put across with such expressiveness that the CD is a pleasure to hear even if its title is something of an indulgence: should the theme of loneliness and disconnection be associated with so many vocal pleasantries? Individual listeners will come at this material in different ways and come away from it with different impressions – but of the sheer quality of the ensemble’s aural blending there will be no doubt.