Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto; Dvořák: Violin Concerto; Curtis Stewart: The Famous People—46.2 F. Harper. Gil Shaham, violin; Virginia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eric Jacobsen. Canary Classics. $21.99.
Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice: 3 Songs; The Hardscrabble; Murmurs from Limbo. Duo Cortona; Nittany Winds conducted by Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin; Thea Lobo, mezzo-soprano; Jordan Rutter-Covatto, countertenor; David Stambler, saxophone; Renée Vogen, horn; Sean Kennedy, tuba; Lee Hinkle, percussion; Taylor Shea, viola; Kathryn Hilton, conductor. Neuma Records. $15.
The way composers come to terms with the past, both personal and societal, varies greatly over time and based on each composer’s individual concerns and predilections. But the desire to explore the past and find ways to interpret it in the present – whatever “present” a composer may be living in – is a consistent one. Gil Shaham and Eric Jacobsen intriguingly explore three composers’ approaches to understanding, accepting and integrating past and present on a new CD from Canary Classics, the label that Shaham founded in 2003/2004. The G minor Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, which dates to 1912, the final year of the composer’s short life (1875-1912), deserves to be far better known than it is; indeed, it would be more than worthwhile if this first-rate recording inspires additional performances. Cast in the usual three movements and packed with Romantic sensibilities and great warmth of orchestration, the concerto is highly virtuosic but subsumes its technical demands within a pervasive aura of expressiveness. It is also a very American concerto: when it was commissioned, Coleridge-Taylor was asked to include Yankee Doodle and the spiritual Keep Me from Sinking Down in it, and he incorporated other spiritual and American-influenced material into the work. Shaham plays the concerto with tremendous engagement and sensitivity, exploring its rhythms and emotional peaks and valleys with care and with first-rate support from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra under Jacobsen. Shaham’s playing is impressive throughout, with his first-movement cadenza and the conclusion of that movement especially noteworthy. The concerto is something of a throwback to the Romantic era in approach and emotional content, but no more so than other works of the early 20th century – and its undoubted effectiveness transcends its time, making its comparative neglect something of a puzzle. Dvořák’s Violin Concerto exists in much the same communicative space despite its much earlier date (1879-1880). Its half-hour length is about the same as that of the Coleridge-Taylor concerto, but its inspiration comes more from Dvořák’s Bohemian roots than from anything in the “new world,” even though other Dvořák works contain notable American elements. The sumptuousness of the orchestral accompaniment in Dvořák’s concerto is as notable as the beauty of its solo-violin material, and Shaham and Jacobsen effectively balance the solo and tutti material – as does the sound engineering, which is particularly well-handled. The exceptional sweetness of the central Adagio ma non troppo is a highlight of a very well-crafted performance that carefully explores the manifest beauties of the entire concerto. The concertos are followed on the disc by a Dvořák-focused encore of sorts, from a suite called The Famous People by Curtis Stewart (born 1980). Stewart’s piece is a rethinking of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances with a rather overdone attempt to connect them to African-American leaders – the one on this disc being based on Dvořák’s Op. 46, No. 2, and intended to honor abolitionist Frances Harper. This sort of overt forcing of the past into the present in ways not inherent in the music constitutes more of a political statement than a musical one. It detracts rather than adds to the effectiveness of the music itself – which is interesting on its own and which effectively delves into some expressive violin extremes that Stewart, himself a violinist, creates to good effect, and that Shaham plumbs with skill. The sociopolitical gloss of the music matters a great deal more to Stewart than it will likely matter to audiences hearing the music on its own terms – and indeed, the piece stands well on its own, not needing any force-fed “connectedness” to come across as interesting and engaging.
Contemporary composers do not necessarily adopt or adapt the past with intensity and seriousness. Wry humor sometimes supplies a gateway of its own, as in The Hardscrabble by Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice. This is an odd and amusing five-movement suite whose underlying conceit is that the composer we know as Handel was actually a monumental fraud: he was a “grossly obese bolt-merchant” known as Händel (with the umlaut), who obtained some excellent music from a real composer named Hamdle as the price of releasing Hamdle from indentured servitude. The incompetence and strictly profit-driven orientation of “Händel” then led to a variety of presentation mistakes in the underlying music, resulting in bizarre arrangements and strange sounds and material that in no way made musical or artistic sense but that served the usurper well by bringing him material success. The whole scenario is created with tongue very firmly in cheek, and the Nittany Winds under Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin submit the entirety of the resulting mess to carefully assembled auditory reality on a new Neuma Records CD. A good deal of the material is quite obvious, being less satire and more in the nature of sarcasm; and the 22-minute suite does go on rather too long for the points it has to make. But there is a lot of genuinely amusing material in it, including some unexpected “mishandling” of the real-world Handel (as well as a good deal of the expected sort); and the concluding Non sequitur movement in fact does follow from the preceding four and leads to a suitably overstated and cacophonous conclusion. The Hardscrabble is the high point of this (+++) disc, whose other two works are both vocally focused, both far more serious, and both less creative than is the rather snide suite for winds. 3 Songs groups settings of unsurprising and rather unoriginal words about community, mutual support, the difficulties of marginalized life, and so forth. The verbiage is strictly self-referencing avant-garde material (“you’ve never/ opened a ramshackle triage/ to dress her torn,/ clot-smear brain”), and the vocal settings are unexceptional, although some of the instrumental accompaniment is interestingly conceived. Murmurs from Limbo is more intriguing because, in its own way, it looks to the past and brings it into the future: the words are from Middle English poets who are considering death and its implications for faith and bodily nonexistence. This is in some ways the flip side of the not-to-be-taken-seriously material in The Hardscrabble, and the use of a countertenor as well as a mezzo-soprano gives the material an apt tie-in to the time period in which the words were written. But the overtly and overly avant-garde accompaniment of the verbiage undermines the effectiveness of the writers’ exploration of belief, resurrection, and disappearance from the world of the living: the mixture of old and new here is overdone and aurally formulaic, with the result that Murmurs from Limbo simply sounds like one of innumerable modern compositions asserting its own meaningfulness while never really coming to terms with the foundational thinking upon which it is built. Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice turns out to have less to say about the end of one’s earthly life and the possibility of something beyond it than did the poets of 800 years ago. The CD as a whole is at its best when it takes itself least seriously – and recognizes that our modern era’s flaws are perhaps not so different from those of Handel’s time. Or Händel’s.
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