(+++) VOCAL CONNECTIONS

Songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Erich Zeisl, Arnold Schoenberg, and Henriëtte Bosmans. Äneas Humm, baritone; Renate Rohlfing, piano. Rondeau Production. $19.99. 

Angélica Negrón: Pedacito de Tierra. Tamara Ramírez-Torres, María Inés Cerra Castaňer, Juan Aponte, Reinaldo Ayala Aponte, and Arturo Steely, storytellers; Casey Rafn, piano; Ryan Smith, tenor saxophone; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone. Navona. $16.99. 

Music for Chorus by Ashi Day, Kota Hayton, Natalie Dietterich, Bill Alves, Blake Clawson, Del’Shawn Taylor, Ben Zucker, Charlie Leftridge, Michael Genese, and Matthew Lyon Hazzard. KC VITAs directed by Jackson C. Thomas. Neuma Records. $15. 

     The connective tissue of vocal recitals can be even more tenuous than that of instrumental presentations. Unless a composer specifically creates song cycles, which have inherent connectivity, performers have to figure out how to interest an audience in disparate works whose main reason for inclusion in a presentation is simply that the musicians think they go well together. Therefore, there tends to be a bit of a stretch when figuring out reasons for listeners to consider owning a particular collection of vocal material. Certainly the Rondeau Production release of art-song performances by Äneas Humm and Renate Rohlfing offers first-rate singing, fine pianistic accompaniment, and a chance to explore some repertoire with which most listeners are probably not acquainted. But that is unlikely to be reason enough for most people to own the CD. So the presentation is given a supposedly unifying title, Sehnsucht (“Longing”), and much is made of the fact that the four composers whose works are presented here were Jewish and had their lives significantly affected by National Socialism, the events that led to its takeover of Germany, and the wartime and postwar musical landscape. Thin though they may be, these tie-together attempts at least provide a framework beyond that of “interesting and worthy art songs that Humm and Rohlfing consider worthy of presentation.” So we get seven songs by Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942), two early ones by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), seven by Erich Zeisl (1905-1959), and four by Henriëtte Bosmans (1882-1952). The obscurity levels of the composers do not connect directly to the worthiness of their music: as well-known as he is, Schoenberg is not highly known for these particular songs; Zemlinsky, who was close friends with Schoenberg and received strong musical support from Brahms, is best known for his relationship with Alma Schindler before she married Gustav Mahler; Zeisl and Bosmans are almost entirely unfamiliar names to non-specialists. Familiarity and sociopolitical matters aside, what turns out to be the true unifying factor among these works is how well they all fit within the traditional art-song genre and within the expressive and harmonic expectations of their time. Bosmans’ songs, which are in French, have a somewhat lighter touch than the others heard here, while Schoenberg’s early works plumb considerable emotional depth and show how thoroughly steeped in the German Romantic tradition the composer was at the start of his career – indeed, Abschied, which lasts nearly 11 minutes, delves to an almost operatic degree into the emotional expressiveness of late Romanticism. There is, it must be said, a good deal of portentousness in these songs, and it is only in the most general sense that the notion of “longing” applies to them as a totality. What can certainly be said about this recording is that Humm and Rohlfing work exceptionally well together, to the point of deepening each other’s contributions to the material; and while the vocal elements of the songs certainly dominate the performances, it is often the piano that underlies and underlines the composers’ expressive intent. This is not really a recording that will reach out to audiences unfamiliar with the art-song tradition or captivate listeners who are not already convinced of the value and level of interest of material of this type. But given the exceptional quality of Humm’s expressive singing and Rohlfing’s attentiveness to the nuances of the piano parts, the songs will bring considerable enjoyment and emotional intensity to people who already appreciate their genre and who are interested in exploring a few examples of well-crafted musical presentation by composers who, well-known or not, were thoroughly versed in the effective use of voice and piano to explore and heighten a variety of emotive experiences. 

     The notion of longing clearly underlies a much-more-recent composition by Angélica Negrón on the Navona label – and here the connections within the material are quite explicit. Pedacito de Tierra (“Little Piece of Land”) explicitly reflects a specific experience in a specific location: it is conceived as “A Story about the Puerto Rican Diaspora in the Twin Cities.” This is, on the one hand, about as narrow a focus as possible; on the other, the limitation to a specific instance of immigrant experience is intended to broaden listeners’ horizons and to work on a much wider level as reflective of displacement and the setting down of roots by any people (not just Puerto Ricans) in any area (not just Minnesota). José Antonio Zayas Cabán is the prime mover of the presentation, which uses five tales told by storytellers from the diaspora and complemented by three instruments and electronics. The idea is to explore cultural identity and what happens to it, beneficially or not, when it is uprooted and placed in a new environment. The personal stories of the five narrators, intertwined with music and underlined by it, serve as touchstones for any sort of immigrant experience even as the narrative details prove unique to the Puerto Rican community and to the specific individuals presenting their own narratives. On the face of it, this is a very narrowly targeted CD, and one aimed at a very specific audience that is highly committed to the concept underlying the presentation: Negrón’s piece lasts just over 11 minutes and is offered as a full-priced recording. So in some ways the packaging and pricing work against the underlying intent to broaden the experiences into ones with which many immigrants or otherwise displaced people can identify. What is attractive here is the storytelling itself, the plainspoken and clearly non-professional narration of the experiences of ordinary people caught up, for various reasons, in a migration not really of their own making. How the storytellers arrive in their new home area, how they adjust, what elements they find easy or difficult, what friction they experience within their own families as well as between themselves and people of other backgrounds – these feelings and more are thought through and talked through, with the three musicians (who collectively call their group {trés}, spelled and punctuated exactly that way) providing points of aural interest, occasional touches of piquancy, and a kind of unifying flow of material that helps connect the otherwise separate narratives. Pedacito de Tierra is essentially a slice-of-life story with musical touches – homage to some very specific personal circumstances while at the same time an attempt to show ways in which those circumstances are, if not universal, at least considerably more widespread. 

     The locality is not Minnesota but Missouri for the vocal ensemble KC VITAs (which stands for – and this is more than a bit overdone, although anatomically accurate – “Kansas City Vibrating Internal Thyroarytenoids”). The group’s stated purpose is to “amplify unheard voices” in a way that creates greater community interconnectedness. Whether or not the aim is fulfilled with a Neuma Records CD featuring 10 works by contemporary composers will be entirely a matter of opinion. As so often with modern music that professes to cross boundaries and to have meaning and importance beyond itself, these works will reach out effectively only to people who already know of and support the singers’ aims and approach – or who support something akin to their orientation under other circumstances and want to show a kind of solidarity-of-aims by engaging with this recording. In the long run – or even the short run – whether the music has staying power is determined by the works themselves, not by the gloss they receive or the intentionality of uplift that the singers consider foundational to their self-professed mission. There is nothing uniting the tracks on this disc except for the uniformly enthusiastic and well-blended sound of the chorus itself – certainly the disc will be a treat for anyone who enjoys a cappella choral material as created in a contemporary context. Different works here use different special effects. Ashi Day’s Boundless is brightly declamatory and comparatively unidimensional. The wordless syllabification in Kota Hayton’s Passing trees, far and near is interesting. The electronic overlays in Natalie Dietterich’s chainlink fences are somewhat old hat at this point, although they are employed to good effect. Bill Alves’ Come out cow takes repetitiveness even beyond the usual extent found in certain modern works. Blake Clawson’s there are fields offers expressive lyricism that sets it apart from most of the other works on the disc. Del’Shawn Taylor’s rethinking of Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop for Death makes the essentially simple words somewhat too grandiose and features an electronic instrumental accompaniment that expands the material a bit too broadly, depersonalizing it in the process. Ben Zucker’s when we arrive at home has a hymn basis that it extends into cloudlike evanescence, with exclamatory interruptions that create an uncertain overall mood. Charlie Leftridge’s “past the river” (from “prima materia”) is refreshingly straightforward, with some well-crafted vocal blendings. Michael Genese’s Medalyons (from “feeld songs”) is slow-paced and less harmonically daring, both vocally and in its instrumental accompaniment, than most of the other material here – and as a result communicates more directly and to better effect. And Matthew Lyon Hazzard’s The Prow swells and ebbs repeatedly, much like the tide that it presumably seeks to emulate, producing a sense of forward motion and incipient arrival that is a touch forced but certainly well-colored from an instrumental perspective. KC VITAs does not really need its written-out title, any more than the composers who insistently avoid capital letters in their pieces’ names really need to do so; these elements are affectations. But much of the music here comes across better than its self-referential elements would suggest, and the chorus does a generally fine job enunciating the lyrics and projecting the various emotions contained within each piece. Certainly not a disc for everyone or even for a broad audience of contemporary-music fans, this CD is a specialized item that showcases – for those already predisposed to listen to choral music – numerous ways in which today’s composers continue to explore the possibilities of communication via a vocal ensemble rather than an individual voice.