(+++) WOMEN’S WORDS

Florence Price: Songs. Karen Slack, soprano; Michelle Cann, piano. ONEcomposer/Azica. $15.99.

Jonathan Newman: Bespoke Songs; Jennifer Jolley: “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers; Carrie Magin: How to See an Angel; Benedict Sheehan: Let Evening Come. Fotina Naumenko, soprano. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Florence Price (1887-1953) has been going through a period of rediscovery, especially since a large collection of her music and writings was found in 2009. Her four symphonies and her piano music have drawn considerable recent attention, but other portions of her oeuvre have not yet become widely known. Among these are her songs – a situation that an Azica release featuring 19 of them (including 16 world première recordings) is intended to help rectify. Ranging in length from one minute to four, these pieces – sung with considerable understanding and feeling by Karen Slack, with subtle and supportive pianistic accompaniment by Michelle Cann – break no particularly new harmonic or expressive ground, and Slack’s focus on their emotional elements tends to result in less-than-clear pronunciation of some of the texts. But lyricism and emotive elements are front-and-center in most of the songs, particularly effectively in Ships That Pass in the Night, Who Grope with Love for Hands, and Beyond the Years. The gentleness of There Be None and the rocking motion of What Do I Care for Morning and Youth are interestingly contrasted with the unexpected drama of The Dawn’s Awake. Among other notable elements in this recital are the quiet sadness of Little Things, the sylvan sound of the accompaniment in Your Leafy Voice, the wistfulness tinged with faint regret of I Remember, and the unexpected pacing changes of Interim. Each of the remaining songs also has attractive elements: Desire, Bright Be the Place, Pittance, The Sum, Sacrament, Winter Idyl, Spring, and Song Is So Old. Musically, the songs are a bit formulaic: virtually all begin with a scene-setting piano solo of a few bars, after which the voice enters and dominates throughout. Emotionally, the songs – whose words come from a number of different sources – mostly involve a focus and rumination on quotidian events and an interpretation of them: nothing here really soars or delves deeply into the realm of the philosophical, with the result that everything is comparatively approachable (as art songs go), but the totality of material is somewhat lacking in variety. Certainly these are not mere pleasantries or salon music, but neither are they works that plumb any particular emotional or philosophical depth or make any significant musical points. All are worth hearing, especially given the high quality of the performances here, but none seems to have significant staying power – at least, none of the 19 seems significantly more noteworthy than any other, although all provide further evidence that Price was adept at writing well-crafted and convincing music.

     If the Price songs showcase the music of a woman composer whose work is still undergoing exploration, those on a New Focus Recordings CD featuring soprano Fotina Naumenko focus on texts by women, in various chamber-music settings. The most-elaborate piece on the disc is Bespoke Songs by Jonathan Newman. It includes 12 songs in six languages: English, French, Hebrew, Korean, Russian, and Swedish. And it has extensive accompaniment for Naumenko’s voice: clarinet, alto and soprano saxophones, violin, cello, guitar, piano and percussion; Nadège Foofat directs the ensemble. Six of the dozen poems are new ones, written by Kristina Faust; others are old, dating back as much as 2,000 years. At every opportunity, Newman looks for ways to stretch the art-song concept: heavy rhythms in The Admonition, bluesy sounds in Elegie, wind-and-percussion combinations in Is There Ecstasy, a broad scale in the opening Here Is a Poem and the concluding This Is My Poem, and so forth. Depending on one’s predilections, the result of all this is either an attractively diversified group of settings or a rather scattered and uneasy stylistic mixture. Naumenko, in any case, clearly believes in the piece and varies her vocals to accommodate the many harmonic, rhythmic, textual and lingual changes. Much more modest is “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers, Jennifer Jolley’s set of three Emily Dickinson poems for soprano, flute (Julietta Curenton), and guitar (Colin Davin). Dickinson is one of the most-frequently-set poets when it comes to English-language art songs, and the three selections of poetry here are scarcely unfamiliar, but Jolley does a good job of keeping the words understandable while creating an attractive aural background – especially in the title song, placed second in the sequence. How to See an Angel by Carrie Magin is a single extended song for soprano, bassoon (Ryan Romine), and piano (Marika Bournaki). The bassoon is especially prominent here, notably in the slower outer sections that frame a brighter middle portion; the extended bassoon solo that opens the entire work is a particularly effective mood-setter. The CD concludes with the four poems of Benedict Sheehan’s Let Evening Come, scored for soprano, cello (Julian Schwarz), and harp (Nadia Pessoa). The pleasant delicacy of the instruments complements and offsets vocal material that is crepuscular, bordering on dark, throughout, even in the intended uplift of the title song (last of the four). The words are clearly important to Sheehan, whose settings and choice of instrumental accompaniment allow them to come through with considerable clarity; in addition, the comparative lack of ornamentation in the vocal part lets the meanings of the texts emerge clearly. Naumenko alters her vocal style, intensity and accentuation according to the needs of each composer’s work, singing all the material with the sensitivity and conviction needed to display these chamber works with vocals as effectively as possible.