Songs from Shakespeare’s Plays. Theatro (Brian Kay, Ashlee Foreman, Anna O’Connell, Peter Walker, Tina Bergmann, Ryan Tyndall, René Schiffer) with guest artists Damian Wilson, Joseph Trapanese, Daphna Mor, Tina Chancey, David McCormick, Gesine Bänfer, Robert Eisenstein, Jeffrey Grabelle, John Romey, Mark Cudek, Ronn McFarlane, and Brandon Acker). AVIE. $19.99.
Cantus: Fields of Wonder—song cycles by Jean Cras, Gavin Bryars, Melissa Dunphy, Griffin Candey, and Margaret Bonds. Cantus (Jacob Christopher, Alexander Nishibun, Paul Scholtz, and Matthew Shorten, tenors; Rod Kelly Hines and Jeremy Wong, baritones; Samuel Bohlander-Green and Chris Foss, basses). Signum Classics. $20.99.
Allen Sapp: Songs. Chelsea Hart Melcher, soprano; Paul Melcher, piano. Navona. $16.99.
It is easy to forget, or never to have known, that Shakespeare’s plays were what we would today call multimedia extravaganzas; and that, far from being rarefied intellectual expressions aimed at audiences’ highest mental faculties, they were the epitome of popular entertainment – not just because of their mixture of some characters (usually noble) speaking in verse while others (usually “low”) speaking in prose; and not just because their deep philosophical musings, even in the tragedies, were invariably paired with overtly lowbrow and often highly sexualized humor. Like other plays of their time, Shakespeare’s stage works combined verbiage with costumes, special effects, and music – lots of music. The players were expected to do more than declaim: they had to sing, dance, and perform on various instruments. The mixture of “high” and sometimes embarrassingly “low” (by modern standards) elements in Shakespeare’s plays remains difficult for many scholars to accept, and the mixture of prosody and music even more so, to such an extent that genuine historically informed performances of Shakespeare are virtually nonexistent – a fact attributable to modern notions of specialization for performers rather than the jack-of-all-trades concept of Elizabethan times. There are, however, a few theatrically oriented musicians who are interested in acknowledging the importance of the songs and instrumental elements of Shakespeare’s plays, and Brian Kay, director of the ensemble Theatro, is certainly among them. On a new AVIE disc featuring 33 songs and other musical material from Shakespeare, Kay not only directs a highly accomplished ensemble but also himself performs as tenor and, in addition, plays lutes, guitars, pipe & tabor, percussion, and orpharion (one of several ancestors of the guitar heard on this CD). This is a fascinating compendium of music – authentic when possible, otherwise arranged – from 14 plays: All’s Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Two Noble Kinsmen, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest, Henry IV Part 2, Othello, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sheer variety of plays represented gives some indication of how pervasive music was in Shakespearean stage productions, and the uniformly excellent performances – singing and reading, solo and ensemble, vocal and instrumental – showcase the strong commitment to this project by all participants. John Dowland’s music is heard often here, both in instrumental form and underlying vocal material, and the arrangements of his and others’ works are varied and exceptionally effectively throughout, heard on solo lute, two lutes, Renaissance violin, viola da gamba, hammered dulcimer and more. Indeed, one pleasure of this disc is the chance to listen to instruments that even aficionados of Renaissance music may not know, including the colascione (a kind of long-necked lute), cittern (another lutelike instrument), cello da spalla (a small five-string cello held like a viola), and woodwind shawms and crumhorns. The music is presented in no particular order, but the scattershot arrangement makes little difference on a disc whose main effect is to show that music was everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Some songs’ words are familiar, others not; and again, this matters little in the context of this CD. True, the last of the 33 tracks, “You Spotted Snakes” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will put listeners in mind of the far more polished Mendelssohn setting of the words; but the point of this recording is authenticity to the extent possible, and Kay (who, on top of everything else, is also the arranger of some tracks) certainly delivers on that basis. Listeners familiar with the specific Shakespeare plays from which these pieces are drawn will get an added level of depth to go with the entertainment value of the CD, since Shakespeare himself used the material – which was the popular music of his time – to provide a gloss on the characters and their actions at specific points in the performances. But even audiences not as well-versed in Shakespeare will find a great deal to enjoy in these sensitively arranged, beautifully played and very well-sung – if under-appreciated – Shakespearean gems.
The singers are equally, if differently, skilled, but the music is less appealing on a new (+++) Signum Classics CD featuring the vocal ensemble Cantus. The five song cycles here – four of them world première recordings – are all about journeys of various sorts, and most share the sort of earnestness and insistence on meaning that reflect some composers’ determination to have their music come across with real-world (not just music-world) significance and importance. The singers of Cantus give every work their all – this is a group that would strive to bring clarity and meaningfulness to an arbitrary series of dictionary entries – and the CD will certainly appeal to listeners who are already fans of the quality of Cantus’ individual and blended voices. But anyone seeking an experience where the music itself is thoroughly engaging will be somewhat disappointed. Dans la montagne, a five-song cycle by Jean Cras (1879-1932) and the only work here that is not a world première, is a high point of the disc, its attractively expressive settings of words by Maurice Boucher (1882-1964) giving the singers many opportunities to explore emotions of beauty and quietude. Edwin Morgan Sonnets, Vol. 2, by Gavin Bryars (born 1943), consisting of three songs to words by Morgan (1920-2010), is well-written for vocal ensemble but tries a bit too hard to be meaningful through a mixture of environmental commentary and intended introspection (“There is a mirror only we can see”). N-400 Erasure Songs by Melissa Dunphy (born 1980), a three-movement work using words by Niina Pollari, Laura Chen, and Dunphy herself, inserts itself strongly into sociopolitical matters, requiring listeners to know that the “N-400” of the title is a U.S. government application for naturalization, and then commenting on the immigration process in poems that drift all over the page – a modernistic effect that cannot, of course, be seen within the music. The actual settings of the words are not always in accord with the texts: on the one hand, the word “reschedule” appears four times (and is sung more than that), while on the other hand, the word “process” is deliberately used only once but is sung multiple times. Whatever its merits as an advocacy piece, this is not a particularly appealing work in musical terms. Protocol by Griffin Candey (born 1988), whose three-movement cycle uses words by Aiden Feltkamp, Kaveh Akbar, and Hieu Minh Nguyen, features some interesting vocal elements, such as a sustained chord in some voices above which others weave the musical and textual line. The three sets of words are mostly complaints (“This is the man I’m not sure I want to be,” “The men could only see themselves,” “Sometimes men will touch a thing as if they’re doing it a favor”), and come across as more hectoring than does the music. Much more interesting is Fields of Wonder by Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), with seven short movements using texts from the fifth book of poetry by Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Bonds sets the words with sensitivity, carefully choosing which ones to repeat in order to emphasize their importance. Unlike the texts for all the other cycles heard here, those for this one are not provided with the disc (“copyright restrictions” are cited); but by and large, the settings are well-balanced enough so the words come through clearly. The subtle tone-painting of the morally ambiguous “Snake” and the multiple verbal repetitions of words in “Birth” are high points in a grouping that gives Cantus plenty of chances to show its strengths as a unison ensemble. Indeed, the sheer quality of the singing throughout this CD is a major plus; but despite the fine quality of the works by Cras and Bonds, even all the skill of Cantus cannot bring the other song cycles here up to an equally high level of meaningful expressiveness.
Matters are somewhat less ambitious and, perhaps as a result, sometimes more pleasant on a new Navona CD featuring songs and song cycles by Allen Sapp (1922-1999). Using a traditional “art song” structure of single voice plus piano, Sapp creates two extended song cycles from the works of poets long popular with composers: Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and George Herbert (1593-1633). The Herrick cycle, The Lady and the Lute, dates to 1952 and contains eight songs set in a mid-20th-century fashion that now seems rather dated: there is considerable dissonance in the piano, and the vocal line leaps and jumps about in ways that are often at odds with the meaning of the words. Herrick was extremely prolific, writing more than 2,500 poems, but is best known for a comparative handful of earlier works that often celebrate the female body; and it is primarily those works from which Sapp selects. Although Herrick’s best-known line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” does not appear in Sapp’s cycle, similar sentiments abound in poems such as “Clear Are Her Eyes” and “Her Pretty Feet,” and Herrick’s appreciation of the female form comes through in “Whenas in Silks My Julia Goes” and “A Sweet Disorder in the Dress.” Sapp does not really take the words at face value, however, writing music that is both more complex and less straightforwardly appreciative than the poetry. Chelsea Hart Melcher and Paul Melcher present the cycle effectively enough, but there is discordance, literal as well as figurative, between Herrick’s words and Sapp’s settings of them. The Herbert cycle is even longer: it is called Affliction, contains 11 songs, and dates to 1983. Herbert’s poetry is considerably more metaphysical and sacred in orientation than Herrick’s, which makes the stridency of Sapp’s settings stand out even more strongly in contrast to many of the words. “What Pleasures Could I Want,” for example, has a first line set with deliberate syllabification that creates a feeling of discomfort immediately, while the skittering piano opening of “My Flesh Began unto My Soul in Pain” is soon joined by a vocal line that, if not painful, is certainly less than comforting. In both of these cycles, Sapp’s main concern seems to be not to elucidate the poetry, or underline the words’ meaning, but to contrast what the text says with music that moves in a very different direction. If this is an attempt at profundity or learned commentary, it falls rather flat, no matter how well the performers put across the cycles’ structures and approaches. Interestingly, this CD also includes two much smaller and rather more successful song groupings. Nursery Rhymes (1952) spins through four rhymes in four-and-a-half minutes, giving listeners a touch of tone painting (galloping piano sounds in “Ride a Cock-Horse”), a bit of amusingly offbeat waltz rhythm (“Old Mother Hubbard”), a snippet of surprising lyricism (“Little Jack Horner”), and a touch of overt cuteness (“Hickory Dickory Dock”). Sapp seems to have nothing to prove here, to himself or the audience, and the result is a kind of straightforward freshness that is more enjoyable than the portentous expressions of the more-extended song cycles. The other work on this CD, which dates to 1988, is simply called 2 Songs – and these are by far the longest settings on the disc. The first, “Anonymous Eponymous,” lasts five minutes; the second, “Riley Set Wryly,” goes on for six-and-a-half. The titles refer to the sources of the words: the first song’s lyrics are anonymous and the second one’s are by James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916). The hymnlike chordal elements of the first song contrast neatly with the words about mischief-making, while the up-and-down bounciness of the second song is amusingly and insistently folklike and, yes, wry. This is a (+++) CD whose two short cycles are more interesting to hear and more successful in communicating the chosen texts than are the longer and more overtly serious groupings. The fine performances do a good job both of setting forth Sapp’s strengths and, intentionally or not, of highlighting some of his communicative weaknesses.
No comments:
Post a Comment