(+++) POETIC MUSINGS

Songs from Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Maude Valérie White, Liza Lehmann, and Arthur Somervell. Brian Thorsett, tenor; Richard Masters, piano. EM Records. $15.99. 

Will Liverman: Songs to Poems by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Will Liverman, baritone and piano; Lauren Snouffer, Jacqueline Echols, Erin Morley, and Ann Toomey, sopranos; Isabel Leonard, mezzo-soprano; Martin Luther Clark and Joshua Blue, tenors; Adam Richardson, baritone; Mykal Kilgore, vocalist; Lady Jess, violin soloist; Lindsey Sharpe, cello soloist. Lexicon Classics. $37.99. 

     Although Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was the most famous poet of the Victorian era, his works have not fared particularly well in more-recent times. To the extent that he is now remembered, it is often for The Charge of the Light Brigade, a thoroughly un-ironic tribute to a singularly ill-considered and ill-fated military maneuver, and for the melodious lines from a different tribute – to a friend and fellow poet who died young: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” But there is a great deal more to Tennyson than that, and if his flowery language is at odds with more-modern poetic sensibilities, the underlying feelings that he plumbs and expresses are in no way time-bound. And that makes them more than suitable for musical elaboration, as is amply conveyed by three song cycles on an EM Records recording featuring Brian Thorsett and Richard Masters. The first work, Four Songs from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” written during Tennyson’s lifetime (1885) by Maude Valérie White (1855-1937), here receives its world première recording. The second of these songs uses the famed “loved and lost” poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., and is presented by Thorsett and Masters with suitable sensitivity and beauty: here and throughout the entire CD, the two performers support each other very well, with Thorsett’s finely expressive articulation well-complemented and underlined by Masters’ thoughtful playing. The remaining three songs in this cycle express similar sentiments that, if not quite as finely honed, are equally emotive – and the plaintive elements of the fourth song, Be Near Me When My Light Is Low, come through to especially fine effect. The moods of thoughtfulness and melancholy also come through well in “In Memoriam”—A Song Cycle (1899) by Liza Lehmann (1862-1918). There are no fewer than 10 Tennyson poems here, which together form more of a genuine cycle than do the White songs, each of which can stand on its own. Lehman excerpts and edits Tennyson and even re-orders some of the poet’s words to produce stronger expressive effects, and the expansive cycle is bookended by its longest entries, starting with I Sing to Him and concluding with Who Loves Not Knowledge? Meditations on sorrow, sleep and death, and nature – dawn, moonlight, air after a rainstorm – are the building blocks of a crepuscular work that delves into the emotional scaffolding on which Tennyson built and re-built his poetic edifices. And the piano plays a more-substantive role for Lehmann than for White, repeatedly taking over the expression of feelings as the singer takes extended pauses – a kind of role reversal that Thorsett and Masters handle adeptly and with feeling. Even longer and more elaborate than Lehmann’s work is Cycle of Songs from Tennyson’s “Maud” (1898) by Arthur Somervell (1863-1937). This is a 13-song cycle drawn from the 1855 poem that in some ways is Tennyson’s most “modern” in its metrical variations, narrative uncertainty and ambiguous and deliberately unsatisfactory conclusion. Tennyson’s poem is full of implied drama seen through the lens of a narrator whose own sanity is less than clear – a psychologically effective technique that, again, makes Maud seem more modern than much of Tennyson’s other poetry. Somervell uses excerpts from the poem, cut and arranged and rearranged and heightened, to produce firmer dramatic flow than Tennyson himself created. The most-famous line of the poem, “Come into the Garden, Maud,” appears just more than midway through the cycle and produces a level of intensity at odds with the Victorian stolidity that Tennyson never quite escaped (or, to be truthful, sought to escape). Thorsett’s care in making the words intelligible and putting their emotional underpinnings across is especially evident here, while Masters’ intelligent accompaniment – sometimes subdued, sometimes emphatic – enhances the work’s dramatic impact. It has to be said that 80 minutes of settings of Tennyson’s poetry are rather a lot to take, and the weaknesses of his work – notably a level of sentimentality and overdone, oft-repeated but constricted expressiveness – come through just as clearly as its strengths. To be sure, neither the poetry nor the music on this disc will be to all tastes, but each of the three composers heard here has a strong claim to understanding Tennyson’s poetic worldview and expressing it effectively in musical terms. Listeners may find the CD to be rather less than the sum of its parts: hearing only one of the cycles, then setting the disc aside for a while before moving on to the next, may be the best way to experience it. 

     The individual songs by Will Liverman (born 1988) are independent of each other but flow from closely linked sensibilities on a Lexicon Classics release bearing the title “The Dunbar/Moore Sessions Complete Collection.” Although packaged as a combination of two separate releases, the single CD runs just 55 minutes, and the songs on it freely mingle material from Volume I (2023) and the new Volume II. The songs’ words are drawn from works by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), whose stormy relationship – premarital, marital and post-marital (although they never divorced) – is very much the stuff of drama and is well-known but, it turns out, is irrelevant to Liverman’s settings. There are 16 well-crafted and mostly straightforward songs on this disc, with Liverman himself the primary singer and with various collaborators participating on specific pieces – almost always to those songs’ benefit, since the tracks featuring Liverman alone tend to be somewhat lacking in expressiveness beyond the emphatic-but-superficial: Life’s Tragedy, for instance, offers pathos at most. As a composer, Liverman has a tendency to try a bit too hard to conform to art-song expectations in songs such as A Prayer (with Lauren Snouffer). When he ventures into something closer to a cross-genre piece, though – as in Sonnet (with Lady Jess) – the music comes across well, and the richness of sound of Liverman’s strong, determined voice is worth hearing even when at the service of some of his less-convincing music. Liverman also has a good sense of the piano underpinnings of the art-song genre, and if nothing in these piano parts is especially distinctive, everything fits the music well, and Liverman has a clear and present sense of delivering keyboard accompaniment that complements the words even if it does not especially enhance them. Among points of interest, the gospel-influenced Emancipation is particularly heartfelt, although the vocal part is somewhat overdone (predictably, in light of the topic); Hymn (with Ann Toomey) is quieter, subtler and more effective because it is less insistent; and To the Negro Farmers of the United States (with Adam Richardson) is dramatic and suitably stirring, even if its assertive uplift is somewhat formulaic. On the basis of this release, Liverman is more impressive as a pianist than a composer, and more as a singer than a pianist. The works on this CD, no matter how effectively he and his colleagues deliver them, sound too derivative and communicate in too many as-expected ways to have much staying power. Just as Tennyson’s poetry was, by and large, of its time, so was the poetry of Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson and Paul Laurence Dunbar. But unlike some of the composers remaking and rethinking Tennyson’s words, Liverman accepts his sources’ work at face value and simply dresses it up in musical garments that fit well enough but are not notably stylish or particularly convincing in asserting the poets’ significance.