(+++) VERSIONS OF THE VOICE

Elgar: Part-Songs. Proteus Ensemble conducted by Stephen Shellard. AVIE. $19.99.

Pierre-Max Dubois: Songs. Élise DesChamps, mezzo-soprano; Alan Huckleberry, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Adam Mirza: Reading (A Mish-Mash) For a Man/I Will Never; Triangles; Growth; QXTR; Cracks; Shared; Time Patterns. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Written over a period of 40 years, 1889-1929, the secular, unaccompanied part-songs by Edward Elgar on a new AVIE disc have consistent smoothness and a mellow quality that fits the eight-voice Proteus Ensemble very well. And, in turn, these singers (Vicki Field and Alison Shone, sopranos; Sebastian Field and David Whitworth, altos; Nick Drew and Ashley Turnell, tenors; Christopher Monk and Steve Grice, basses) fit their voices into a blend of continuous beauty that effectively brings forth Elgar’s stylistic elegance and the care with which he draws attention to the songs’ words and underlines their meanings. There is a level of consistency, which is to same sameness, in Elgar’s part-song writing, which means that the sequence of songs is largely immaterial stylistically and they can be placed in any order at the whim of a chorus and conductor. This 17-song collection is thus arranged as a kind of personalized statement by Stephen Shellard and his ensemble, with, for example, the early Op. 18 songs Love (words by Arthur Maquarie) and O happy eyes (words by Elgar’s wife, C. Alice Elgar) placed, respectively, 12^th and last, while the late Good Morrow (words by George Gascoigne) – a musical get-well wish for the then-ailing King George V – appears midway through the program. Elgar drew on a wide variety of sources for song lyrics, then homogenized the sound of the resulting works in such a way that the words always come through clearly and the vocal balance is always carefully managed – an ideal arrangement for the Proteus Ensemble, which blends its four vocal ranges with consummate skill. The works of some well-known poets inspired a few of these songs: Byron (Deep in my soul), Shelley (O wild West Wind!), Longfellow (As torrents in summer), Tennyson (There is sweet music), and Ben Jonson (I sing the birth). But Elgar was equally moved by translations, by Rosa Newmarch, of Russian poetry by Nikolai Minsky and Apollon Myakov – resulting in the lovely settings Serenade, Death on the Hills, and Love’s Tempest. It is worth pointing out that Elgar wrote with a larger chorus in mind than the eight-member ensemble heard here, and greater vocal forces are more in line with his usual musical approach. But the small-group presentation by the Proteus Ensemble lends these miniatures a kind of direct and personal charm that would be considerably less present in a larger choral setting. It is also worth mentioning an occasional misstep in this presentation, such as the pronunciation of “wind” with a short “i” rather than a long one at the start of the Shelley-based song, whose final two lines clearly rhyme “wind” with “behind.” These quibbles, however, have little bearing on the overall enjoyability of this very nicely presented vocal recital, which shines a light on some of Elgar’s less-known works and could well inspire other choruses to consider including some of these part-songs in their own repertoire.

     Even less familiar than the Elgar works are the songs of Pierre-Max Dubois (1930-1995), which are presented as a complete set of world première recordings by mezzo-soprano Élise DesChamps and pianist Alan Huckleberry on an MSR Classics CD. Dubois wrote a total of five song cycles. The earliest, Étoiles Brûlées, includes five songs to words by Maurice Fombeure and dates to 1959. It was followed by Trois Chansons (to anonymous lyrics) and Le Zodiaque (words by José Bruyr), respectively sets of three and 12, in 1962; Six Chansons (words by Phillippe Soupault) in 1963; and Cinq Poèmes Chantés (words by Jean Tardieu) in 1969. Dubois, best known for his works for saxophone and other woodwinds, is adept at setting song lyrics clearly and understandably, and if some of his piano accompaniments tend to the repetitive, his verbal arrangements contain pleasant surprises here and there. The song-cycle sequence is not chronological on this CD, but each grouping has elements of particular effectiveness. Thus, in Six Chansons, the fourth and shortest song, Pour le mauvais jours, opens with nice bounce and soon moves from singing to an emphatic speaking portion, while the concluding Monsieur Pépinet nicely balances consonance and dissonance and has a few spoken words of its own. In Le Zodiaque, highlights include the determined pacing illustrated by the piano in Le Lion, the well-thought-out musical portrayal of water in Les Poissons, and the effective up-and-down vocal contrasts in Les Gémeaux. In Trois Chansons, the contrast between delicacy and seriousness in Ne dérangez pas tout le monde is particularly well-handled. In Étoiles Brûlées, the delicate sadness of Chanson de la rose is attractive, and the very spare accompaniment of Vielles chansons is notable for creating a comparatively dark mood. And in Cinq Poèmes Chantés, the march rhythm of Rengaine à pleurer comes across well, the percussive elements of Rengaine pour piano méchanique are well-expressed, and the pointed dissonances in the piano contrast well with vocal elements sung unaccompanied in Contre-point-du-jour. This is scarcely a disc that will reach out to a wide audience, but it is one that is quite well-performed and that provides listeners interested in 20^th-century French compositions – or specifically in the works of Dubois – with a fine opportunity to explore some little-known vocal music that is well-made and contains a number of elements that are well worth hearing.

     A strong interest avant-garde music-making in the 21^st century is de rigueur for appreciation of the works of Adam Mirza on a New Focus Recordings release featuring pieces written between 2006 and 2022. Mirza is avowedly devoted to experimental music, electronic and otherwise, as his handling of vocal material makes abundantly clear. The deliberately peculiarly titled Reading: (A Mish-Mash) For a Man/I Will Never includes a vocal portion of, yes, reading, with wide-ranging exclamatory bits and pieces of musical notes tossed about by members of the no-capital-letters ensemble loadbang (trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice). The piece might make an interesting theatrical exercise – perhaps the spoken words could be projected on a screen as the various parts proceed at their different speeds – but as a recording, it simply seems discordant and disconnected (which, of course, may be part of its point). The six remaining works here, all with much shorter if not inherently more intelligible titles, go beyond the vocal realm entirely. Triangles (played by Alice Teyssier on flute, Josh Modney on violin, and Cory Smythe on piano) is the longest piece on the CD, lasting nearly 13 minutes, and focuses on individuation of the instruments rather than any ensemble playing that might make this seem like a more-conventional trio. Growth is for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and electronics and is performed by a group calling itself Unheard-of/Ensemble. An early clarinet exclamation bears a passing resemblance to something from Gershwin’s An American in Paris, which may even be intentional, since the piece is intended as a collage expressing the spirit of Atlanta, where Mirza grew up. There are real-world sounds such as airplane noise throughout, often electronically modified, and here as in other works for multiple players, Mirza seems mainly interested in keeping the performers separate and having them mingle rarely, if at all. QXTR is a brief string quartet (played by the Mivos Quartet) in which the musicians endeavor with some success to sound like electronics rather than performers on acoustic instruments. Cracks uses two players (the Bent Frequency Duo Project) in what is intended as stereo (antiphonal) positioning for theatrical purposes, with the version heard here focusing on wind and percussion exclamations that remain mostly separate – as is clearly common in Mirza’s music – while occasionally coming together long enough to clash. Shared for string trio (the Amorsima Trio) features a wide variety of performance techniques with essentially no musical content, as if the players’ objective is to show the ways in which they can perform on their instruments – whose sound is continually pushed beyond the norm – while not actually engaging, singly or together, in the presentation of any organized aural material at all. And Time Patterns for solo violin (Olivia de Prato), which concludes the disc, takes a similar approach to a single stringed instrument: there are skitterings and stutters, martellato and legato elements, creation of extreme notes designed to sound electronic, and other characteristics that Mirza likes to bring forward as if to indicate that musique concrète is not only alive and well but also omnipresent. Mirza’s emphatic devotion to avant-garde sounds and to assertion of non-melodic, non-rhythmic aural exclamations by all instruments makes this disc strictly an offering for the like-minded and for those interested in sonic production, by voices and instruments alike, that is independent of the usual forms of engagement and continuity with which composers have traditionally sought  to reach out to audiences.