(+++) MELODIES AND MEANINGS

Schubert: Songs. Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano; Timothy Lovelace, piano. AVIE. $19.99. 

Cantus: The Secret Letter—songs by Abbie Betinis, Saunder Choi, Mohammed Fairouz, Leoš Janáček, Libby Larsen, Francis Poulenc, Steven Sametz, Mari Esabel Valverde, Consuelito Velázquez, and others. Cantus (Jacob Christopher, Alexander Nishibun, Paul Rudoi and Paul Scholtz, tenors; Rod Kelly Hines and Jeremy Wong, baritones; Samuel Bohlander-Green and Chris Foss, basses). Signum Classics. $20.99. 

     Some songs’ words transcend their times; others’ are firmly bound to them. The 19 by Schubert chosen by mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and pianist Timothy Lovelace for a new AVIE recording have proven their durability and communicative potential for two centuries – even for audiences that do not know the words and may, even with the assistance of translation, not be familiar with all the poetic references. Part of Schubert’s genius at lieder lies in the way his songs’ tunefulness and emotional clarity sweep listeners along into a world, whether real or imagined, where they can dwell throughout a song’s duration, no matter the time period in which the words are set and no matter the era in which the audience itself hears the music. The songs to which Osowski lends her deeply expressive voice date from various times in Schubert’s short life and are unconnected thematically – the disc is essentially a personal collection of the performers’ favorites, less effective as a totality for being something of a mishmash even though Osowski’s way with individual songs is uniformly impressive. Virtually nothing here will be unfamiliar to listeners already acquainted with Schubert’s songs. Osowski tends to be a bit breathless, emotionally if not physically, in the faster-paced works, really coming into her own in the darker and slower ones such as Nachtstück, Wandrers Nachtlied II, and Nachtviolen. A certain degree of vocal delicacy is occasionally missing, as in Ganymed, in which the piano and voice seem somewhat at odds expressively – unusual in light of how well Osowski and Lovelace intermingle almost everywhere else. Indeed, the emotional balance between voice and piano, so key an element of Schubert’s songs, is very effectively highlighted in nearly all these selections, with the last one on the disc, Im Frühling, being an especially good example. This is a recording for listeners who simply want to have Schubert’s unending tunefulness flow over and around them – there is no foundational unifying principle here, and none is needed for anyone content simply to bask in selected elements of the beauty to which the emotional appeal of Schubert’s tunefulness consistently opens the door. 

     Matters are quite different on the latest Signum Classics release featuring the vocal ensemble Cantus. The 17 tracks on this CD are thoroughly disconnected from each other musically but united through the performers’ insistence that everything here flows from assertions of LGBTQ+ love. That is a somewhat self-limiting assertion, indicating that the recording is only for members of a specific community or non-members deeply in tune (so to speak) with that community’s sociopolitical and personal stances. In fact, the quality of Cantus’ singing is a better unifying factor for this material than any assertion of societal significance: the disc, like that of Schubert’s songs, can be enjoyed simply for the quality of performance, even by listeners who do not understand the multiple languages in which the songs are offered. The eight singers of Cantus (tenor Paul Rudoi now replacing Matthew Shorten) deliver all the disparate musical material with equal fervor, with the result that the interwoven readings of love letters of various types (the letters being the reason the disc bears the title The Secret Letter) seem more intrusive than unifying. Just like the cited letters, the actual music here crosses so many genres and time periods that any sort of aural convergence would be nonexistent were it not for the ensemble’s uniformly smooth, well-sung (and well-spoken) delivery of whatever material they put their minds and voices to. Thus, although a couple of minutes of Poulenc and a dash of Janáček have, objectively speaking, very little in common with the Chris Foss vocal arrangement of We Kiss in a Shadow from The King and I, and just as the connection between a Marcus Aurelius letter and one from Walt Whitman is at best rather strained, Cantus manages to cement a sense of unity of this recording simply by approaching all the material with equal attentiveness, balance and emotional receptivity. It is highly unlikely that any listener will want this recording specifically for the performance of the Lennon/McCartney Blackbird or the world première recording of Saunder Choi’s Light Years to Lebanon (which, at seven-plus minutes, is the longest work on the disc). It is much more likely that Cantus will here succeed in reaching out in part to those who accept the underlying “cause” elements of the disc and, more widely, to listeners enamored of the elegance and sure-voiced delivery of all the material, whatever each work’s foundational reason for being may be and whatever each is intended to convey in this specific context.