(+++) CHOICES

Poulenc: Figure Humaine; Songs of the American Civil War. Skylark Vocal Ensemble. Sono Luminus. $15.99.

Liszt: Piano Music. Sandrine Erdely-Sayo, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Paul Pinto: String Quartet No. 4; Marina Kifferstein: String Quartet No. 2; Lewis Nielson: Pastorale para los pobres de la tierra. The Rhythm Method (Leah Asher and Marina Kifferstein, violins; Meaghan Burke, viola; Carrie Frey, cello); Alice Teyssier, flute & voice. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     The decision of what music to include on any recording is only part of what is involved in choosing to make a CD. How to present the music is also crucial to whatever the performers are trying to communicate. Matthew Guard, artistic director and conductor of the Skylark Vocal Ensemble, clearly wrestled with this issue when making decisions about a new Sono Luminus disc. The main work here is Poulenc’s 1943 Figure Humaine, which explores war from the perspective of the year of its composition and ends with an impassioned plea for liberté. It is a major a cappella work of its time, but it is a work of its time, for all its considerations of the generalized horrors and depredations of war. And it is in French, setting words by poet Paul Éluard. So to try to make the Poulenc piece more accessible to a 21^st-century audience, Guard elected to have the ensemble intersperse its eight movements with eight songs, in English, relating to the American Civil War. The intent is clearly to search for the universality of antiwar messaging, to bridge the language barrier between French and English for those not fluent in both, and to demonstrate the power of massed voices to communicate individualized and strongly felt emotions. The intention is good; the execution, not entirely successful. This is not a problem with the Skylark Vocal Ensemble itself: the group sings with feeling, enunciates the words clearly (although the Éluard texts seem to give the singers a bit of trouble here and there), and sounds thoroughly dedicated to this project and its foundational message. What somewhat undermines the effectiveness of the presentation, however, is that the Poulenc work – which has considerable power as it builds to its final call for liberty – is here broken up into eight sections and then intermingled with the American folk songs, which communicate in a very different way and are in fact part of a different musical idiom. The power of Poulenc is vitiated by the constant dipping into different sensibilities and a different language, and the adjacency of the Poulenc movements in no way elevates the comparatively prosaic expressions of the American songs. Placing Johnny has gone for a soldier between two movements of Figure Humaine may make a kind of sense, but having Abide with me show up within Poulenc is somewhat bizarre, and making the disc’s penultimate track The Battle Hymn of the Republic (followed by the conclusion of Poulenc’s cantata) is just plain odd. Again, none of this takes away from the quality of the performances (although, in truth, the conclusion of The Battle Hymn of the Republic is somewhat overdone here). But the alternation of Poulenc’s complex and highly sensitive music with the much more matter-of-fact English-language material ends up making this well-sung disc a good deal less effective than it would have been if the Poulenc had been presented from start to finish – followed by all the Civil War songs in a sequence calculated to reflect their varied concerns.

     The decisions made by pianists performing the music of Franz Liszt are of another kind: there is so much Liszt piano music, with so many approaches to so many topics on so many levels, that no pianist attempts a Liszt recital without having some overarching form of communication in mind. It is not, however, always clear to listeners just what the “framing tale” of a given recital is intended to be – yet it often does not matter if the individual works are performed with skill and commitment. That is certainly the case with the 12 pieces included on a new Navona disc featuring pianist Sandrine Erdely-Sayo. The works heard here are all over the aural map in terms of their length, intent and effect. The centerpiece of the recording is a thoughtful, elegantly played version of the six Consolations. The delicacy of the first and second – similar in mood but very different in sound – is brought forth with considerable care. The slow third and fourth are thoughtful and on the autumnal side, expressive without pathos. The pleasantries of the fifth and berceuse-like rocking motion of the sixth come through to fine effect. Yet it is worth noting that the Consolations are literally the centerpiece of this CD, being preceded and followed by material of very different provenance within Liszt’s oeuvre. The disc open with Romance in E minor, S. 169, which suggests that a pervasive sense of quiet sadness is likely to dominate the recording. But then comes the longest work on the CD by far – as long as all the Consolations put together. It is Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, and it changes the prior crepuscular mood to one of thoughtfulness, uplift and spirituality. Erdely-Sayo gives it an expansive performance, allowing its silences and long-held notes to become an integral part of its communicative style. And she follows it with Saint François de Paule marchant sur les flots, another extended religion-focused piece (although only half the length of the Bénédiction) – and here the use of the left hand to represent the waves on which the saint walks is especially well-done and evocative. It is after all this material that Erdely-Sayo plays the Consolations, thus giving those six pieces a spiritual gloss that is certainly justifiable but not entirely necessary to experience and enjoy them – the context here is completely the pianist’s choice. And after the Consolations end, there are three more works to come, all thoughtful and nocturnal in their own ways but not really partaking of overt spirituality. Liebesträume No. 3 is an understandably famous work for its thematic beauty and the simplicity of its evocation of the dreamlike – although the pianism it calls for is scarcely on the simple side. The nocturne En Rêve – whose title in effect duplicates that of Liebesträume – is quieter and more peaceful, drifting always toward the keyboard’s upper reaches until it evaporates into beauty. And then, at the end of the disc, there is Liszt’s arrangement of the Ständchen (Serenade) from Schubert’s Schwanengesang, in which Erdely-Sayo dwells on the communicative straightforwardness of the themes and the sense of pathos that underlies all the loveliness of the music. In its totality, this very well-played recital conveys a level of sadness and emotional quietude stopping short of despair but seeming to seek comfort in a myriad of ways – without ever entirely settling into it. The disc will appeal to listeners willing to experience an extended period of wistfulness and near-weepiness: an hour-plus of inward exploration courtesy in part of Liszt but to an equal extent of a pianist making careful selections of the composer’s work in furtherance of her desire to emphasize specific elements of Liszt’s vast production of keyboard music.

     The main choice to be made by the members of the string quartet called The Rhythm Method for a New Focus Recordings CD likely involved the disc’s sequence. The three works offered here were all written for the ensemble, and one was composed by a member of the quartet. So everything is contemporary in sound, everything is recently created, and everything is intended to be played by the performers for whom the music was written. Furthermore, everything uses such now-standard sound-and instrument-extension techniques as microtonality, vocalization, and performance approaches outside the long-established norms for strings. This means that the CD is self-limited by choice: it is for audiences already familiar and comfortable with the approach of these composers and these performers, and already well-attuned (so to speak) to the expectations and communicative methods of contemporary music. Such audiences will be ready to engage with Paul Pinto’s String Quartet No. 4, which bears the title “I pass’d a church.” Pinto’s idea is to use the strings to represent the sounds that could be made by a church – that is, by the building itself – as it attempts to recover from damage caused by hurricanes. The scale here is very broad, the pacing very slow, and the sounds frequently unlike anything one would expect strings to produce: sighs, groans, wavelike emissions, wind that sounds like words and actually blends into vocalizations, and more. Scarcely designed to be musical in any traditional sense, the quartet – like many avant-garde compositions – sounds like a performance piece, designed with theatricality that is intended to evoke visual rather than auditory scenes in listeners’ minds. The performers follow this with String Quartet No. 2 by the ensemble’s second violinist, Marina Kifferstein. This piece does open with string sounds, albeit long-drawn-out ones that form the athematic, non-rhythmic “sound clouds” of which so many contemporary composers and performers are fond. Once again in this work there are blendings of string sounds into vocalizations, and vocal sounds back to those of strings. The primary effect here is of an extended and repetitive fade-in and fade-out. The piece does not seem to be trying to communicate anything in particular – instead, it presents an aural experience from which listeners can select what meaning they like and respond to it in any way they wish. Placed third and last on the disc is its longest work by far: Pastorale para los pobres de la tierra by Lewis Nielson. Like the other pieces here, this involves vocalizing blending and contrasting with instrumental sounds – but this piece is actually a quintet, incorporating Alice Teyssier’s flute and adding her voice to those of the string players. Indeed, the vocal element here is in one sense paramount: there are actual words spoken, drawn from works by Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and St. Francis of Assisi. The dissonant opening pizzicato emphasis and the percussive elements with which the piece begins soon expand into a sound world in which verbiage (by no means always easy to hear or decipher) blends into and contrasts repeatedly with otherworldly instrumental lines that are often very busy but rarely for any specific discernible purpose. Like many other avant-garde works, including the other two on this CD, Nielson’s appears to exist mainly to create a world of sound from which listeners can pick and choose what to hear and what meaning to assign to whatever they choose to experience. Again, this is a theatrical experience as much as an aural one, and quite deliberately goes beyond the bounds of what audiences will expect of music – unless those audiences are already conversant with and appreciative of this form of expressiveness. There is nothing on this disc that will reach out beyond a core group of enthusiasts, but for those who are advocates and supporters of this sort of engagement and entertainment, the recording will be effective in providing a particular kind of soundscape to which those with suitable musical convictions will gravitate.