(+++) JUST BE CAUSE

Music by Ukrainian Composers. Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin; INSO-Lviv (Symphony Orchestra of Lviv National Philharmonic) conducted by Roman Kreslenko; Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serhii Khorovets. Naxos. $19.99. 

Juhi Bansal: Love, Loss, and Exile; Cecilia Livingston: Salt Air; Jens Ibsen: Why won’t you let me look right at you?; Jodi Goble: Night-time in the Fourth Trimester; Jasmine Arielle Barnes: The Original Rebellion. Laura Strickling, soprano; Joy Schreier, piano; Carrie Bean Stute, cello. Sono Luminus. $15.99. 

     There is nothing new about music being used to underline a cause (bagpipes were classified as a weapon of war in 1746); to be created specifically to forward one (La Marseillaise by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle was commissioned in 1792 by the mayor of Strasbourg [not Marseille] after France declared war on Austria); or to celebrate a specific occasion (Beethoven’s Der glorreiche Augenblick for the Congress of Vienna in 1814). Nor is there anything recent in the notion of repurposing existing music for a new cause of some sort (The Star-Spangled Banner from John Stafford Smith’s drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven). But nowadays there is an increasing tendency to take music that was never intended as “cause” material and enlist it in the service of one or another sociopolitical viewpoint. Whatever the sincerity of the artists who do this, the value of the approach tends to undermine the purely musical qualities of the pieces by putting the works at the service of a purpose for which they were never intended. And recordings of those works are self-limited in audience reach, since they are designed for people who already support the underlying cause or may be recruited to it – or at least to solidarity with it – by the simple and possibly but not necessarily sincere expedient of spending money on a cause-focused recording. So a new Naxos CD featuring violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and consisting entirely of world première recordings is intended not so much to explicate Ukrainian classical music as to focus listeners’ attention on the nation’s circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Hence the disc’s title, Music of Resilience. But resilience is not the actual purpose of all the works here: some were indeed written in 2022 or since then, but others long predate the Russian invasion, and their connection to the “resilience” concept is at best forced. Ukrainian history is complex: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, which is packed with Ukrainian folk themes, is traditionally called the “Little Russian” because of the historical name of Ukraine; but nowadays some commentators insist on calling it the “Ukrainian” even though in 1872, when Tchaikovsky wrote most of the symphony, Kamianka (the town where he vacationed and composed, called Kamenka at that time) was within the Russian Empire. So matters are less straightforward than advocates of all sorts want them to be. It is therefore fair and, one could argue, desirable to evaluate discs such as Ivakhiv’s from a strictly musical standpoint – on which basis the CD contains some interesting if not entirely compelling material, notably works that are folk-inflected rather than cause-driven. Autumn Song is the shortest and oldest work here, dating to 1916 and composed by Osyp Zalesky (1892-1984) – played here in a 2024 violin-and-orchestra version by Bohdana Froylak (born 1968). It is sweet, charming and unpretentious. Another older work on the disc is Ukrainian Rhapsody No. 1 (1956) by Roman Prydatkevych (1895-1980), also arranged by Froylak, whose three movements reflect pervasive melancholy – even in the concluding Dance, whose peppy tempo contrasts with its mostly doleful melodic environment. Froylak’s own Nocturne of 2008 – in yet another violin-and-orchestra arrangement – appears here as well, sounding more mournful than restful in Ivakhiv’s elegant but rather dour performance. In general, the music here is on the monochromatic side emotionally, pensive when not overtly mournful, likely selected on just that basis to support the “cause” focus of the CD. Bucha.Lacrimosa (2022) by Victoria Vita Pohlevá (born 1962) is interestingly orchestrated and more dramatic than most of these works, but emotionally overstated and over-obvious in the differentiation between its quiet opening and closing and its intense middle. Ex Libris (1993) by Hanna Havrylets (1958-2022) consists of four short movements for solo violin that effectively explore the instrument’s range and emotional capabilities, coming across as essentially a set of études. There are two works here by Bohdan Kryvopust (born 1975): On the River (2024), featuring gentle melodic flow, and the four-movement Ukrainian Suite (2024/2025), an impressionistic/illustrative work that connects explicitly with the Russian invasion (its hesitant, uncertain third movement is called When I Got My Draft Notice) and concludes with a virtuosic but far from upbeat movement simply called Dance. The CD itself ends with a 2014 work by Yuriy Shevchenko (1953-2022) called We Do Exist! (We Are!). Although it significantly predates the Russian invasion, its pervasive melancholy and mournful character, emphasized (perhaps even over-emphasized) in Ivakhiv’s playing, seems reflective of a depressive mood that speaks less of resilience than of endurance through hardship. The work’s quiet fade-out ending seems intended to question how much more resilience is called for in Ukraine – or at least that is the intent of the performers, if not of the composer. The disc is very well played – the fact that it is idiomatic and sensitive to nuance almost goes without saying – but it is unlikely to reach out to music lovers as music. Its entire aim is solidarity with a nation undergoing massive depredations, and it is a recording for people fully in tune (so to speak) with the performers’ commitment to endurance through tremendous hardship. 

     The first work on a new Sono Luminus CD featuring soprano Laura Strickling is also a piece with a specific geopolitical focus: Juhi Bansal’s Love, Loss, and Exile sets poems by anonymous girls from Afghanistan and is intended to reflect the conditions there since the chaotic American withdrawal in 2021 and the resumption of rule by the Taliban. Uniformly bleak, verging on the hopeless, the songs evoke an inner landscape of despair that makes the five-song cycle difficult to listen to from start to finish despite (or because of) the sensitivity of Strickling’s vocal delivery and the spare and careful backup of pianist Joy Schreier and cellist Carrie Bean Stute. The overt dissonances within the songs are less effective than the portions possessing a degree of lyricism that contrasts tellingly with the emotions being expressed. The title of this “cause” CD is Legends: Rebellion, and it is offered as a focus not on a specific place – its initial foray into Afghanistan notwithstanding – but as a sociopolitical commentary on women’s roles and women’s concerns. This is scarcely a groundbreaking focus, and it is fair to ask whether the disc brings anything new to it. The fair answer is “not much” philosophically or argumentatively – so the followup question is whether the music as music will attract audiences beyond those who either know the composers represented here or are predisposed by the CD’s foundational reason for being to listen to it uncritically. Aside from Bansal’s work, everything here is only for voice and piano; and each piece has a different orientation as well as a different composer. Cecilia Livingston’s Salt Air explores the thoughts of three mythic female characters: Kalypso, Circe, and Penelope. The focus is always on the women as positive characters: Circe, for instance, is not a villain transforming men into beasts but a captive of the system within which she lives – and which she, in her own way, defies. Jens Ibsen approaches not Homer but Schubert in Why won’t you let me look right at you? Again this is about power, in this case the maiden from Death and the Maiden asserting hers in the face of the ultimate conqueror of all. Jodi Goble’s five-song cycle Night-time in the Fourth Trimester is a reconsideration of motherhood, seen through the lens of exhaustion. More effective in its mixture of styles and vocal forms than the other works on the CD – all of which are at pains to straddle “art song” and other milieux – Goble’s cycle is considerably more prosaic verbally than musically (“Feeding this fragile creature. / While I scroll and refresh.”) The intent appears to be a correction of idealized concepts of motherhood; the actuality that comes through is one of resentment of the fact that being a mother is not easy – a kind of “well, duh” discovery. The CD ends with Jasmine Arielle Barnes’ The Original Rebellion, using words from a social-media poem that is mostly about what “they say” about hate and how wrong those comments are, since “Love is the original rebellion.” The tendency to believe that everything proclaimed on social media is a grand discovery rather than a new and often thoroughly mundane iteration of long-held feelings or beliefs looms large here, with Strickling delivering, with intended intensity, lines such as “I have seen light bust the darkness” and “even wolves raise their young.” Obviousness and sentimentality aside, the work is simply not convincing musically – but that is neither its point nor, in the main, the point of the other music here. The underlying cause is what matters: belief in and adherence to it, not efforts at convincing non-adherents, will attract what audience this disc will engage. Like contemporary “cause” recordings in general, this one is intended not to reach out but to reaffirm the rightness of the already formed thoughts, feelings and beliefs of a particular “in crowd.”