(++++) DEEP VOICES, DEEP FEELINGS

Schubert: Winterreise. Jakob Bloch Jespersen, bass-baritone; Sharon Prushansky, fortepiano. OUR Recordings. $17.99.

Elena Ruehr: Songs—Five Men; Lied; Travel Songs; Wonderful Bears; Lullabies & Spring Songs. Stephen Salters, baritone; Donald Berman and David Zobel, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

     Schubert wrote Winterreise for tenor, just as he wrote the earlier Die schöne Müllerin for that vocal range – but he himself started the tradition of transposing the cycles for other voices, partnering with baritone Johann Michael Vogl on tours through Austria. The tenor voice, in both cycles, emphasizes the youthfulness of the protagonist; but given the deeper darkness of Winterreise, a lower voice is more effective at enhancing the gloom of the monodrama – to the extent that Schubert’s music needs any enhancement. The key to an effective Winterreise for lower voice is the singer’s ability to express the underlying naïveté of the spurned lover’s thinking while projecting a greater aura of mature sorrow that stops just short of complete despair. The protagonist of Die schöne Müllerin is more boyish; the one of Winterreise, although still young, suffers emotionally in what can be considered a more mature and complex way. Jakob Bloch Jespersen does an absolutely first-rate job of traversing this emotional landscape in his new Winterreise from OUR Recordings. The resonance of his voice, which fully plumbs bass-baritone depths in some songs but sits comfortably in the baritone range most of the time, brings depth as well as aural beauty to the grief expressed in Wilhelm Müller’s comparatively simple and naïve poetry – which is included in German but, unfortunately for English speakers, not translated. Key to Jespersen’s interpretation is the slow emergence, as Winterreise progresses, of a general sense of sorrow, beyond that occasioned by lost love, and eventually a sense of existential despair that persists right through the puzzling and ambiguous final Der Leiermann. A fine singer carries the audience through the hour-plus of Winterreise in ways that slowly but surely deepen the anguish – which is never, however, unmixed with beauty in the music. There is a silky smoothness to Jespersen’s rendition that makes the sense of ever-deepening sorrow increasingly clear, with Der Lindenbaum, the fifth song, having something closest to a sense of peacefulness until the singer turns his back on the tree and starts (or continues) on a road leading ever downward emotionally. The headlong Rückblick and almost static Irrlicht that follows it are but one example of the musical contrast and duality that Jespersen explores to fine effect. And here as throughout the cycle, the playing of Sharon Prushansky immeasurably enhances the overall listening experience. This is because Prushansky plays a fortepiano – a replica of one built in the 1810s – rather than a modern concert grand. Again and again the exceptional value of this instrumental choice comes through – Frühlingstraum and Das Wirtshaus are two especially fine examples among many. The lighter and slightly harsh sounds of the fortepiano, the skillful way Prushansky utilizes the instrument’s pedals to vary the aural palette, the lesser key travel (compared to a modern piano’s) that produces a more-intimate feeling and leads to a very different balance between voice and piano from that experienced when Winterreise is performed by a tenor backed up by a modern instrument – all these elements, plus a recording that very skillfully balances vocal and instrumental sounds, result in a reading of depth, sensitivity, and emotional coherence, flowing from beauty to beauty as the cycle wends its way through the chill of the outer and inner landscapes in which it takes place.

     There is nothing matching this depth of feeling in the vocal music of Elena Ruehr (born 1963) on a new AVIE recording, but there is plenty of emotional heft and vocal beauty in the performances by baritone Stephen Salters, for whom Ruehr wrote the works recorded here. Indeed, the CD bears the title “Songs for Stephen,” a title that hints at the specificity that somewhat limits the attractiveness of this (+++) disc. Because Schubert’s song cycles start from the specific and reach out toward the general, as Winterreise certainly does in its transformation from a tale of love lost to one of world-weariness and the questioning of existence, the time-bound elements and superficialities of some of Müller’s poetry are entirely forgivable. Ruehr, however, writes songs that are determinedly about specific circumstances and that, as a result, are limited in their appeal to audiences not within their constrained purview – no matter how well Salters sings the words. This is especially apparent in Five Men, which is just one of composers’ innumerable attempts to proclaim the African-American experience – this one using words by Elizabeth Alexander that sweep from the slave ship Amistad to the presidency of Barack Obama. The most-effective element of Ruehr’s setting is at the very beginning, a wordless hum that captures audience attention and suggests a level of depth and universality that the actual verbiage assiduously avoids. Much more intriguing – and actually tied directly to Schubert – is Lied, sung in German, with words by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here the heft of Salters’ voice comes through with clarity and effectiveness, and the expressive four-minute song does not overstay its welcome. The three Travel Songs, with words by Richard Blanco, try somewhat too hard to turn the mundane elements of Paris and Venice into experiential life tokens, while the music tries, also a bit too earnestly, to mix and match elements of Salters’ voice, from the lower ranges to falsetto. In particular, the slow, quiet and long (seven-minute-plus) central song exists in a kind of stasis that Salters manages gamely but that tries too hard to be earnest. Wonderful Bears, with words by Adrienne Rich, is more interesting both in text – which revisits nighttime childhood fears with an overlay of nostalgia – and musically, giving pianist Donald Berman a more-substantive role than in any of the other works he accompanies. The wistfulness of the last portion of the song does not fit Salters' delivery particularly well, but he handles it with admirable sensitivity. The final item on this CD features pianist David Zobel and uses words by Langston Hughes. Lullabies & Spring Songs turns out to be the most-engaging work on the disc, precisely because it does not constantly try to proclaim its importance, relevance, what-have-you. These are songs for children, their occasional reminders of skin color (“sweep of stars over Harlem streets”) subsumed within a celebration of the upbeat and pleasant, even when (as in Sandman) there are hints that all is not well all the time for all children (“a horrid dream of a horrid rat” and “a bad, bad dream of a raging bull” for kids who deserve them). In these songs, Salters’ voice, which tends to tighten when he is trying hardest to be earnest, flows naturally and with appealing expressiveness. As a whole, the CD certainly works as a collaborative production that is simultaneously a tribute of Ruehr to Salters. But most of these songs insist too strongly that they mean something and that listeners should find them significant – with the result that they never rise above a kind of disordered advocacy of this or that. The settings are fine, the singing well done, but the overall effect of the CD is of a highly personal joint effort that only rarely and imperfectly reaches out beyond the participants.