Music for Countertenor and Piano. John Holiday, countertenor; Kevin Miller, piano. Pentatone. $17.99.
Patrick Zimmerli: Letters from the Front. Desirée Hassler, soprano; Angela Born, mezzo-soprano; John Riesen, tenor; David Govertsen, bass-baritone; Ian Gindes, piano. Lexicon Classics. $15.
Sometimes – and it is certainly the case with the Pentatone release featuring John Holiday – a recording is less about what is being performed than about who is doing the performing. Holiday (born 1985) is a countertenor whose musical tastes, on the basis of this CD, are very eclectic indeed. The disc, which is called "Over My Head," includes arrangements of spirituals and popular songs by Holiday himself; three Vocalise offerings by Carlos Simon (born 1986); and works in multiple genres by Hall Johnson (1888-1970), Theo Morrison (born 1938), Robert L. Morris (born 1943), and H. Leslie Adams (1932-2024). Everything about the disc is highly personalized: the choosing of the material, the sequencing of the 20 tracks, and the hoped-for response to the recording (“each selection in this collection is a piece of my heart”). Listeners accustomed to hearing countertenor voices in Baroque music or other classical material will find little to engage them here, so variable are the tracks. For example, the vocalises are delivered sensitively and with beauty – but the fast-paced, upbeat and thoroughly unsubtle handling of Gershwin’s Summertime will likely miss the mark altogether for the vast majority of listeners. Not so for Holiday himself, though, and that is the entire point of this recording: it is made by him and for him and for those who are closest to him (the brief booklet features an extended, heartfelt dedication naming them). Gospel, jazz, blues, and other forms mix and intermingle here, united entirely by Holiday’s personal musical taste and his desire to reach out to those already in his orbit. Perhaps part of the intent is to bring others close to him as well; if so, the CD will do that only to the extent that Holiday’s use of his gifted countertenor voice is in accord with the thoughts, feelings and musical interests of audiences that do not yet know him. Also, it is certainly true that the focus of popular music (in all its genres and subgenres) has very frequently been on the performers rather than the works they perform. So there is plenty of precedent for what Holiday has done here. Listeners should be aware, though, that this is not an introduction to or exploration of the countertenor voice. It is all about this countertenor voice in this specific repertoire. The attraction here lies in wanting to experience Amazing Grace and Fly Me to the Moon and the works of Johnson, Morrison, Morris and Adams as filtered through Holiday’s very personal arrangements and his highly individual delivery of the words.
The vocals are equally the point, but in a very different way, on a Lexicon Classics release of Patrick Zimmerli’s Letters from the Front. This work for four vocalists and piano accompaniment not only homes in on the singers but is also intended to give voice to the men and women whose words librettist Mirabelle Ordinaire has used to structure and construct the entirety of the work. In form a song cycle, Letters from the Front is also, in its own way, as individualized an offering as anything presented by John Holiday: the words of these letters are very personal indeed, whether expressing a mother’s World War II hopes and worries to her son, a son’s Vietnam War feelings to his mother, the thoughts sent by a soldier to his brother during the American Revolution, or the concerns expressed by a Union fighter to his wife during the Civil War. The Gulf War, World War I – they too are here. Wars differ, are fought with different weapons at different times, but Letters from the Front highlights the ways, the many horrible ways, in which they are the same: families sundered, constant fear, hopes unrealized, death in so many forms from so many places. “The priceless blessing of peace,” one line from one letter, is again and again sought, again and again not found, as front-line soldiers and their loved ones contend with separation, uncertainty, worry and trauma of all kinds. If there is a criticism of what Zimmerli and Ordinaire have wrought, it is that the music, while it never makes any of the wars attractive, tends to minimize rather than accentuate the suffering underlying the words – a better (and more listenable) approach than deepening the sorrow and driving listeners into depression, but still a touch of what should probably be called graywashing (that is, nothing as extreme as whitewashing). The uniformly high quality of the singing gives a veneer of sophistication to words that are, in the main, plainspoken and straightforward, not so much elevating them to some imagined poetic pantheon as turning their specifics into unintended philosophical generalities about the nature of war and of those caught up in it. Letters from the Front is ultimately a thoughtful presentation that gives wide-ranging voice to feelings never intended to be shared with the world at large. This makes the work, to some extent, a disservice to the letter writers. But to a greater one, it is a service to listeners who, whether or not they themselves have a military background, are living in a world shaped, for better or worse, by the conflicts these letter writers experienced firsthand.
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