(+++) THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW

Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera. Concordian Dawn conducted by Christopher Preston Thompson. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Jake Heggie: Song Settings of Emily Dickinson. Melissa Davis, soprano; Jerry Wong, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     The title of the second MSR Classics release from the medieval-music ensemble called Concordian Dawn is a bit of a puzzlement, given that neither Aristotle nor opera can be deemed medieval. The group’s first release, Medieval Songs of Fate, Fortune and Fin’amor, was clearer in its focus, provided that listeners understood that “Fin’amor” is a dialect term (Occitan) for “courtly love.” The second CD is in fact similar in some ways, all of them positive, including its painstaking and thoughtful approach to the work of composers who will likely be wholly unfamiliar to most modern audiences. The performers, as before, include Christopher Preston Thompson as conductor, tenor, and instrumentalist on the medieval harp; soprano Karin Weston; not one but two countertenors (Clifton Massey and David Dickey, with Dickey also playing recorder); bass Andrew Padgett; and Niccolo Seligmann playing vielle, a precursor of the violin that, as both the recordings show, has a very different but still clearly related sound. Of the 10 pieces on the new recording, three are anonymous, including one from the 11^th century – a truly remarkable distance in musical terms. Four works here are by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377); there is one from Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361); one from Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. 1147-1180); and one three-minute piece with elements credited to four separate composers. And how do all these works relate to or explain the disc’s title? The “Aristotle” reference has to do with Aristotelian notions with which some of the songs are imbued; the word “opera” turns out not to mean what modern audiences think it means, but to refer to the overall operatic – that is, multimedia – nature of the performances and the reconstruction of the music. This is all a bit rarefied and abstruse, having to do with the academic study of medieval music and the impossibility of truly re-creating it in modern times – because even if we could know for sure how it was supposed to sound (and we do not), the context in which it was produced and was intended to be heard was so different from our own that there is no way to bring it into our own time. That is, we cannot hear the music as it was meant to be heard, even if we can approximate (imperfectly) the way it was meant to sound. Very, very few listeners are likely to find the intricacy of this sort of thinking interesting or more than slightly meaningful. Thankfully, however, it is not necessary to delve into the underlying issues facing re-creation and performance of works of this time period in order to enjoy those performances. The members of Concordian Dawn may have no way to bridge the musical time span of nearly a thousand years, but the transcriptions and reconstructions performed here all have considerable power and considerable beauty on their own terms – or, rather, on the terms that modern scholars, performers and listeners bring to them in attempting to reproduce as many elements as possible of their original creation. These are works of beauty, of delicacy, that maintain communicative power even if one does not speak the languages they use or live within the culture and time period in which they were created. Some of the solo voices sound angelic, as if elevated beyond mere earthly concerns; others are warmer and more emotional; the grouped voices come through with considerable clarity and expressiveness; and the instrumental sounds serve as transport to a world very different from ours. If we cannot possibly re-create that world or know its intricacies, we can at least receive, through this music, hints of what used to be – and a reminder that in all times and places, music has served to express, to elevate, to emphasize, to emote, to evince an understanding of the human condition, whatever it is or may once have been.

     More-recent times are certainly more readily comprehensible to contemporary audiences – or at any rate those audiences, and those who perform for them, like to think so. It is the perplexing and inward-looking elements of the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) that continue to make her words so attractive to composers of much later times, including Jake Heggie (born 1961). There are no fewer than 19 Dickinson-based songs for soprano and piano on an MSR Classics disc featuring Melissa Davis and Jerry Wong, and all the words are set with care, utilizing Heggie’s understanding of what he thinks Dickinson was trying to express (although it is worth pointing out that here too there are ongoing academic studies and arguments about the poems’ meanings). Heggie finds many ways to use Dickinson’s words: The Faces of Love and Newer Every Day, for example, are five-song cycles; The Rose Did Caper on Her Cheek, a world première recording, is a single song; there is also a two-song group, another world première, called Could It Be Madness – This? Heggie organizes the groups around similar (or at least analogous) themes, according to his understanding of the words; the cycles then contrast with individual songs, even when some of the material is nominally related – for instance, The Road to Bethlehem is a single song, while The Faces of Love contains the song As Well as Jesus? Davis and Wong make a fine, sensitive and committed interpretative pair, and when given the chance to shine as an individual, Wong goes beyond accompaniment to add in significant ways to a song’s emotional heft – as, for instance, in the openings of Silence and The First Day’s Night Had Come. Most of the songs are short – the entire CD runs just 47 minutes – but all have a feeling of compression. It is as if their meaning has been squeezed into a limited number of words (as poetry generally does) and the words have then been mixed with illustrative musical material that underlines Dickinson’s thoughts without attempting to expand or comment on them. If there is a flaw in this approach, it is that Heggie’s consistency of interpretative handling of the words results in a good deal of musical sameness: the actual sound of the songs is similar throughout the CD, despite the differences of the words and the emotions they convey. Some listeners will justifiably feel that this shows how thoroughly Heggie has absorbed the poetic world of Dickinson, or at least his interpretation of it; others, however, may wish for a somewhat greater variety of approaches to the verbiage, given the fact that while Dickinson does have a clear style, the feelings she evokes and the words she uses come in more guises than are apparent from their accompaniment here.