CD Reviews

Vivian Houle, vocalist

Treize

Drip Audio

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1. Mandrake (with Peggy Lee, cello)
2. Molehills mumps (with Lisa miller, piano)
3. Paperthin (with Coat Cooke, saxophone)
4. Gratte-moi le dos (with Kenton Loewen, drums)
5. Quiet eyes (with Ron Samworth, guitar)
6. It’s not the moon (with Chris Gestrin, analog keyboards and live sampling)
7. Betters and bads (with Jesse Zubot, violin)
8. Finely tuned is my heart (with Jeremy Berkman, trombone)
9. Au revas (with Paul Plimley, piano)
10. A little storm (with Jeff Younger, guitar)
11. Bells hung in a tree (with Clyde Reed, bass)
12. Song not for you (with Brent Belke, guitar)
13. Curve (with Stefan Smulovitz, kenaxis)

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The very essence of chamber music is perfectly captured in these thirteen tracks. Viviane Houle’s duets with each of these artists is raw music making – free improvisations that transcend the ordinary and provide sonic experiences unlike anything else.  Houle’s sonic repertoire is no short of astonishing.  Half of the time I can’t tell which sounds she is making and which are being made by her instrumental counterpart.  On the same token, both performers on each track are so adept at listening to each other that the flow of events sounds totally organic and alive.  While the bulk of the tracks are showcases for Houle’s vocal fireworks she is always blending with the ensemble and creating a sonic “hyperinstrument” that is neither one nor the other.

A few of the tracks feature a more traditional melodic and sung role for the voice.  Houle, who also wrote all the texts, trends towards the smokey and hazy sounds of somber jazz or beat poetry.  Her rich sound and warm emotional expressions are further featured on one of my favorite tracks, It’s not the moon. Houle’s voice is the DNA of Chris Gestrin’s synth work creating a haunting, graceful, and eternal sounding track.

The last three tracks on the disc transition smoothly from one to the next, making an excellent journey.  Bells hung in a tree has a subdued ending that sounds like it continues as the next track fades in.  Song not for you hits me right in my Heavy Metal spot.  Houle and Belke sound like a great thrashing metal duo from somewhere in the Oort Cloud who have recently learned to sing using random Japanese phonemes (and I mean that in the best possible way).  The thrash continues while the ambient sizzle of Curve takes over.  Like It’s not the moon, Curve puts Houle’s voice in the background and she inexorably emerges from the synthetic world into an oozing and pulsating mass of delicious aural goo.

THE WHITE ELECTION:
32 Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson

Lisa Delan, soprano
Fritz Steinegger, piano

PentaTone

Another winner featuring the charming presence of Lisa Delan! These 32 poems that Gordon Getty has set to music have the thematic and musical unity to constitute a real cycle. The subject is Death (the “White election” of the title), and the poems look at the subject subjectively from every angle. Getty organizes them in four Groups: 1, The Pensive Spring; 2, So We Must Meet Apart; 3, Almost Peace; and 4, My Feet Slip Nearer. A noticeable progression occurs as the poet delves ever deeper into the mysteries of life and death, which are not the diametric opposites we commonly imagine.

I will leave aside the identity of the “dim companion” in the poems that seem to point to a definite love interest in the life of the semi-reclusive Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who went to her grave a life-long spinster. Gordon Getty summarizes the case very succinctly in his program notes, and others have written at book length on the subject. Since death for Ms. Dickinson meant the spiritual reunion with those we have loved, it opened the portals to a new life, and was not at all life’s antithesis. The symbolism of white raiment, in which she dressed the last twenty years or so of her life, applies to both to the shroud and a wedding dress. She equates them with a ferocious optimism in such verses as “No more her patient figure / At twilight soft to meet, / No more her timid bonnet / Upon the village street, // But crowns instead and courtiers / And in the midst so fair, / Whose but the shy, immortal face / Of whom we’re whispering here?” Or consider, “Sufficient troth that we shall rise, / Deposed, at length, the grave, / To that new marriage justified / Through Calvaries of love.” Many other examples could be cited.

As scholars have observed, Dickinson’s poetry seems to spring from origins in church music, especially in the shape of her discrete four-line stanzas, though the flow of the thought often carries over between those stanzas, and they are not as foursquare metrically as many church hymns often are. Getty conjectures that Dickinson, who had studied voice and piano, must have set many of her poems to music for her own satisfaction. These “odd, old tunes” (her description) were certainly not intended for publication, which would have been out of character for someone who never sought to publish her poetry during her lifetime. In setting them to music, Getty confides, “I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems.”

As played by Fritz Steinegger, the perfect partner for Ms. Delan in this recital, the piano accompaniment is ideally suited to the sense of the lyrics. It seldom takes the form of a florid line, but usually occurs in the form of widely spaced chords or even single notes, either quietly stated or powerfully expressed, depending on the emotion of the poetic line. Occasionally it becomes more florid, as it does in a poem that celebrates the reunion of mother and son in death after many years, he a recent casualty in one of the Civil War’s terrible battles: “When I was small a woman died, / Today her only boy / Went up from the Potomac, / His face all victory. // To look at her how slowly / The seasons must have turned, / Till bullets clipped an angle / And he passed quickly round. ” The vigorously extended piano introduction before the first stanza suggests the rapid call of bugles; in this case, the martial music is both unusual and appropriate to the idea of death as a victory over the unnatural pain of separation, numbed though it may be with the passing years.

Other lyrics do not embrace death with such enthusiasm. There is skepticism about it in such lines as, “The going from a world we know / To one a wonder still / Is like the child’s adversity / Whose vista is a hill. / Behind the hill is sorcery / And everything unknown, / But will the secret compensate / For climbing it alone?” Other poems contrast the poet’s curiously disjunctive perceptions of the two states, life and death: “And sometimes odd within; / The person that I was / And this one do not feel the same. / Could it be madness, this?” And sometimes she is struck by the odd discrepancy of feeling and perception between the bereaved and the departed: “I cried at pity, not at pain, / I heard a woman say, / “Poor child,” and something in her voice / Convicted me of me. // She’s “sorry I an dead” again, / Just when the grave and I / Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep, / Our only lullaby.”

OF course, even a first acquaintance with Dickinson’s poetry gives you the impression that it is at the same time simple in form and very sophisticated, both in her daring use of approximate and vowel rhymes and in the way a simple declaration or a striking images can resonate with meanings far beyond the stave’s end. You can’t just set them to music and sing them without interpreting fine nuances of significance. To that purpose, Getty’s song accompaniments often continue beyond the last stanza, extending and amplifying the mood and purpose of he poem. And Delan’s vocal artistry is well adapted to expressing the shifting, swiftly surging emotion in such run-on lines as “The bell within the steeple wild / The flying tiding told: / How much can come, / And much can go, / And yet abide the world!” As a song interpreter she may well be unequalled.

BAD DOG:
A PORTRAIT OF GEORGE CRUMB
Tony Arnold, soprano
Robert Shannon, piano
David Starobin, guitar
George Crumb, percussion

Bridge Records (DVD)

American composer George Crumb, as we learn early in this delightful video, was born on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929. He’s been an unsettling influence for people with fixed ideas about music ever since. Reasoning that we all have different DNA and life experiences, he states, “I have to distrust any school of composition that eliminates the persona of the individual composer.” Certainly, his footprint is different from that of other carbon-based life forms in the music profession. In this program of performance and interview, Volume 14 in Bridge Records’ George Crumb Edition, we get to know the composer in a very personal way. He may have his idiosyncrasies, but he is also utterly without pretence and filled with earnestness to communicate to his audience in a way that some of our other contemporaries would do well to cultivate.

Crumb is relatively well behaved in this program. There is no “spoken flute,” no pouring glass marbles into an open piano or any other aleatoric (i.e., random) technique. In fact, in Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik (A Little Midnight Music), the major work for extended piano in the middle of program, he is at pains to notate precisely what he expects of the performer. In this instance, it is pianist Robert Shannon, who does a fabulous job realizing a score in which he is required to play the piano in non-traditional, percussive ways involving considerable open-piano techniques.

The work is so-named because it consists of ruminations on Thelonius Monk’s “˜Round Midnight. Other composers have fooled around with the strings inside the piano, but none, I imagine, as well as Crumb. Shannon is continually on his feet, plucking or striking the strings with his hands or using them to play arpeggio like figures and palm clusters that impress the listener with their flights of fancy reinforcing the prevailing mood of the piece. From time to time, he strikes the metal crossbeams with a yarn-covered mallet, the repeated notes adding an eerie quality that enhances the nocturnal theme. (He does all that in addition to playing the keyboard without the benefit of a bench.) All these techniques serve the real purpose of extending Monk’s familiar main tune through a series of nine ruminations in which it drifts in and out of our consciousness like a dream without losing its character. In the process, we encounter mysterious block chords, mischievous staccato figures, nightmare distortions, forte passages, ringing triads, rocking or falling triplets, tritones, and even, in 6: Golliwog Revisited, an affectionate parody on Debussy’s famous Cakewalk, complete with that composer’s impudent dig at Wagner’s “Tristan” chord!

A special treat on this program is vocalist Tony Arnold. We hear from her first in Three Early Songs from Crumb’s 18th year: “Let It Be Forgotten” and “Wind Elegy” (texts by Sara Teasdale) and “Night” (Robert Southey. In case you haven’t noticed, a fascination with the night runs through Crumb’s music.) The composer himself terms these deeply felt early works, which he dedicated to his future wife Elizabeth Brown,  reminiscent of Barber and Rachmaninov, though a close listening reveals his own “latent fingerprints.” More mature works heard here are a lively “Sit Down, Sister” (2003), based on the well known African-American spiritual and featuring the talents of all four members of the ensemble, and Apparition (1979), originally written for the unique voice of Jan DeGaetani and here rendered with the greatest vividness and luminosty by Arnold and Shannon. The latter-named work is based on extracts from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Significantly the verses are from the sequence in the poem known as the “Death Carol,” and not the Lincoln elegy with its rich symbolism of the drooping star and the song of the thrush that has inspired most of the other composers who have treated the subject. Tony Arnold’s pure tones, her cleanly rendered melismas, and her unfailing sensitivity to the meaning of the text, all serve to convey Whitman’s paean to Death as the central point between life and a return to the universal life force.

And, yes, there’s broad humor in this program, primarily in two excerpts from Mundus Canis (A Dog’s Life) entitled “Fritzi” and “Yoda” and inspired by canine members of the Crumb household. Both are deft portraits that capture the personality of their subjects. Yoda, the fluffy white Bichon Frise that we see on the cover (I actually thought it was a stuffed toy until I watched the video) is characterized by scampering guitar passages and rasping percussive sounds, ending in the words “Bad Dog,” spoken by Crumb, which give the program its title. But a curious ambiguity persists: is Yoda the naughty dog of the title, or is it Crumb himself?

SONGS
Amy Burton, soprano
Patrick Mason, baritone
John Musto, piano

Bridge Records

This was my first acquaintance with American composer John Musto: not his opera Volpone, nor his Passacaglia for Large Orchestra, both of which have won him acclaim, but his songs. Perhaps they are his most typical creations, for they show an uncommon, unerring ability to meld sound and sense. Musto has the rare ability to find exactly the right musical setting for each poetic text and to fit it with the perfect accompaniment. In this program, he has two ideal song interpreters for collaborators. Patrick Mason’s deep baritone seems perfect for the songs in the first set of the program, “Viva, Sweet Love.” It is complimented perfectly by Amy Burton’s attractive and versatile soprano voice, which possesses the flexibility to encompass everything from Mozart heroines to Broadway to music written for the French diva Yvonne Printemps. Musto himself plays the piano accompaniments, which often have a life of their own, carrying on and deepening the mood of a song.

Musto’s songs are more complex than they might seem at first hearing. They can be deceptively sparse sounding, as they often are in the “Viva, Sweet Love,” set to poems by e. e. cummings and James Laughlin that are often deliberately cryptic in their syntax in order to force the reader to delve into the deeper levels of emotion and meaning that lie underneath, as it does in cummings’ “image of the sea stretching forth and being taken in and released again as a metaphor for “love, / the breaking / / of your / soul / upon / my lips” (as is the sea marvelous). Or take the same poet’s marveling at the ever-renewed enchantment of love by each new twosome who discover it: “such a sky and such a sun / I never knew and neither did you / and everybody never breathed / quite so many kinds of yes” (sweet spring). In these songs, Patrick Mason cultivates a spare, unadorned vocal quality that serves the needs of the poetry well.

In the six lyrics of the set Quiet Songs, Amy Burton applies a greater variety of vocal techniques to a more diverse collection of songs. In cummings’ “maggie and milly and molly and may” four little girls go down to the beach to play and each brings back a different impression, which is really a part of herself, from the experience, “for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.” Quiet Songs, to a text by Eugene O’Neill, explores different varieties of quiet and solitude: “Here / Sadness, too, / Is Quiet / Is the earth’s sadness / On autumn afternoons.” The musical setting here is quite different in mood and texture than it is for the denser setting Musto gives Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Christmas Carol, with its bitter lament for the lost meaning of the holiday: “How mute you lie within your vaulted grave. / The stone the angel rolled away with tears / is back upon your mouth these thousand years.”

The last part of the program has Mason and Burton alternating a program of eight other songs, including a moving duet in Old Gray Couple (text by Archibald MacLeish), in which New York Festival of Song co-founder Michael Barrett joins Musto for the duo-piano accompaniment. Here, the text and its interpretation give poignant meaning to the paradox that love, in old age, dwells on “absence, not presence: what the world would be / without your footstep in the world / “¦ love, like light, grows / dearer toward the dark.” Some of these poetic texts such as Mark Campbell’s Nude at the Piano and Dorothy Parker’s Résumé and Social Note are both pungent and pithy, and Musto finds the settings appropriate for them: “Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.” Flamenco (text by C. K. Williams) has an appropriately Andalusian quality to its accompaniment, even as Mason and Musto (as composer) focus on the paradox that the Flamenco guitarist, who it turns out is a drug addict, doesn’t live above a whorehouse as he claims, and isn’t even Spanish, still “played like a fiend.” Penelope’s Song, to a poem by Didi Balle and sung here by Amy Burton, is perhaps the most the most intriguing poem of all in its repeated entreaty by the speaker “Don’t hurry home, love / Don’t hurry home / . . . I’m in love with beginnings. / Landing and leaving / Weaving and unweaving, / This nomad’s heart / Needs to start / Love’s journey again.”

Songs by American Composers
Lisa Delan, soprano
Kristin Pankonin, piano
Assisted by Susanne Mentzer, mezzo-soprano; Matt Haimovitz, cello

PentaTone

This recital by the wonderful American soprano Lisa Delan created pleasant peril for me, and I don’t mind admitting it. Lord, but there’s so much diversity here! These seventeen songs by six composers – William Bolcom, Gordon Getty, Jake Heggie, David Garner, John Corigliano, and Luna Pearl Woolf – range from cabaret and blues to genuine art song and modern folk-inspired. The lyrics cover the whole poetic spectrum: poignant, piquant, witty, profound, wickedly satirical, sad, and sensuous, with even a bit of pathos here and there. It’s as if I’d been admiring the artistry of one of those jugglers who can balance a rubber ball, a basketball, a bowling ball, and a pineapple all at the same time, and was requested by the artist: “Here, won’t you please keep these going for a while so I can take a break?”

Nor were my brother wizards in the upper stratosphere any help at all. A diligent search of the “˜net failed to reveal any previous reviews from which I could crib. It could be I’m the first reviewer with the temerity to tackle this musical landmine in the shape of a compact disc. That’s a scary thought!

So, where to begin? Where, I ask you? Could it be Bolcom’s delightfully impudent Cabaret Songs to lyrics by Arnold Weinstein, Amor, Close the Curtain, Waitin’ and Toothbrush Time? Impossible in just a few words to describe the impish quality Delan imparts to the flirt who inspires just one response from everyone she encounters, from the ice cream man to an all-male jury: “Amor!” Or the light twist given a contemporary wail of morning-after alienation in “It’s toothbrush time, / ten a.m. again and toothbrush time. / Last night at half-past nine it seemed O.K. / But in the light of day not so fine at toothbrush time.” Gordon Getty’s settings of three of his own poems, ranging from the delicate tracery of Where is My Lady, (“In footfall and starfall again and again, / beauty and grace she is, beauty and grace / Hang in the air like chimes when she goes by”) to the rousing, stamping high spirits of Tune the Fiddle and the poignant sense of pristine beauty lost in The Ballad of Poor Peter, bring forth an impressive range of interpretive responses from Delan, in collaboration with the sensitive accompaniment of pianist Kristin Pankonin. “Upon a day, along a way, / I met a child. / She said, “˜Come find me if you can: / you lost me when the world began.’ / I asked her meaning but she ran / into the wild.”

Jake Heggie, like Getty a native San Franciscan, finds inspiration in the traditional, represented by his setting of Sir Philip Sydney’s Elizabethan lyric My True Love Hath My Heart and arrangements of three American folk songs, Barb’ry Allen, He’s Gone Away, and The Leather-winged Bat. The first three are moving and dignified in their expression of deep-running emotion, as befits tradition. The last is a purely delightful romp that gives Delan the chance to characterize the four avian voices in the poem with some shrewdly funny accents: “‘Hi,’ said the woodpecker sittin’ on a fence, / “˜Once I courted a handsome wench, / She got sassy and from me fled, / And ever since my head’s been red.’” Garner’s Annettes-Lieder are modern art song settings, sung in the original German, of three poems by the remarkable poetess Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848): Im Grasse (In the Meadow), Am Turm (On the Tower), and Der Weiher (The Weir), the last-named filled with the atmosphere of her beloved moorlands in Westphalia. What a remarkable figure Annette must have seemed to her contemporaries: her poems are vigorously romantic, stern, and completely unsentimental. They cry out for the spirit of wild adventure then enjoyed solely by men, and were not what her era expected of a woman, even an aristocrat. With the aid of Pankonin and Matt Haimovitz, whose cello lends eloquent support here, Ms. Delan reaches sublime heights in such verses as “When in my breast the dead come to life, / Each corpse wakens and stretches; / Lightly, so lightly drawing breath, / And the eyelids lightly flutter, / Loves past, times past, joys past. / All these treasures mingled in the rubble, / Brush against each other: timid sounds, / Like the tinkling of chimes in the wind.”

The “wickedly satirical” element I mentioned earlier is found in Corigliano’s Two Cabaret Songs, to poems by Mark Adamo. Dodecaphonia, for which Corigliano originally flirted with the title “They call Me Twelve-tone Rose,” evokes police suspect descriptions a la film noir. It’s spiced with choice lyrics like “She lured the likes of Bernstein, even / Copland to her camp, / that vaguely ethereal, always funereal, / post-Wagnerian vamp” and “she’ll lead you to inversion / and you’ll fall for ev’ry pitch, / “Cause she’ll never use the same pitch twice.” Originally premiered by the incomparable Joan Morris, Dodecaphonia sounds just as great when Lisa Delan does her own take on it. Marvelous Invention satirizes the tendency for even great music to descend to mere wallpaper when pressed into a handbag full of compact discs: “So play me Sondheim or Takemitsu when / it’s time to walk my Shih-Tzu.” Finally, Woolf’s Odas de Toto el Mundo (Odes for Everyone), for which Haimovitz again adds the dark color of his cello, captures the flavorful Latin dance rhythms, the insouciance, the melancholy, and the exotic metaphors of the poem by the great Chilean author Pablo Neruda. Delan, who commissioned this piece, revels in such exotic imagery as “I sell / jungle odes / that run on puma feet: / they must be handled with care, behind bars, / they come / from age-old forests, / they are hungry.” What better way to conclude so thoroughly enjoyable and provocative a recital than the poem’s final stanza: “See you soon / when all things / become song”?

“WONDROUS FREE”
Song of America II
Thomas Hampson (baritone)
Craig Rutenberg (piano), Wolfram Rieger (piano)

THM

Tom Hampson is a fellow who isn’t easily deterred. Not content to wait upon the vagaries of major record labels and their A&R managers, he started his own Hampsong Foundation to promote intercultural understanding through song, specifically through the preservation of our own rich (and somewhat neglected) heritage of American songs. “Wondrous Free” is Part 2 of a series begun last year with “Song of America,” both of which are available through his own website at thomashampson.com. If anything, this collection is even richer than its predecessor.

The program begins with the classic simplicity of he title song, “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free” by Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), said to be America’s earliest composer of note, and continues up to the present. With his honest, clear baritone possessed of an impressively wide range, especially in the upper register, Hampson does a splendid job shaping the contours of the familiar folksong “Shenandoah” (arr. Stephen White, b.1943); instead of drawing out the long vowels in the word “Missouri,” he foreshortens it at the end, giving the listener the un-familiar heart-stopping emotion of witnessing something that has disappeared forever. Only Hampson could take a really sentimental song like Stephen Collins Foster’s “Nelly was a Lady” or Charles Ives’ version of “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and not make it drip with cheap sentimentality. Try singing the lyrics “Seldom from her eyelids / were the teardrops banished” or “Ring the bell for lovely Nell / my dark Virginny bride” without waxing schmaltzy, and you’ll see what I mean!

Some of the finest specimens of genuine art song on this album are three settings by John Duke of poems by Edward Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory,” “Luke Havergal,” and “Miniver Cheevy.” These are rare instances in which great poetry meets with musical arrangements that do it justice. “Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal / where the vines cling crimson on the wall / and in the twilight wait for what will come. / The leaves will whisper there of her, and some / like flying words will strike you as they fall; / But go, and if you listen she will call.” Surely those lines are the perfect metaphor for death and the pain of separation. Hampson handles them with the dignity and the unadorned emphasis they deserve.

Death, as a matter of fact, is a common denominator of many of these songs (There’s nothing like a wake to bring out the best in American poets). William Grant Still’s “Grief,” to a text by LeRoy V. Brant is in this tradition: “Weeping angel with pinions trailing, / the white dove, promise, stands!” So are Ives’ setting of John McCrae’s famous lyric “In Flander’s Fields,” Edward MacDowell’s “The Sea,” with its premonition of the seafaring lover’s death, and Foster’s “Hard Times,” with lyrics particularly meaningful for contemporary listeners: “Many days you have lingered around my cabin door, / O! Hard times, hard times, come again no more.” Paul Bowles’ Blue Mountain Ballads (1946) are distinguished settings of four lyrics, some poignant, some saucy, all pithy, by Tennessee Williams. “Cabin” just may be my favorite: “Now the cabin falls / to the winter wind / and the walls cave in / where they kissed and sinned. // And the long white rain / sweeps clean the room / Like a white-haired witch / with a long straw broom1″

Sidney Homer’s 1926 setting of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” captures all the spirit of its high-spirited original: “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum / (Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” The tub-thumping piano accompaniment to the rousing vocal line would have been to Lindsay’s delight: the last thing he wanted was for his poetry to be read silently in the solitude of one’s den or study. It was to be recited, and with fervor. Tom Hampson’s stirring rendition of this song makes the listener want to rise up and enlist as a Salvationist! And the sheer vocal gymnastics Hampson employs in his rendition of the first part of Ives’ “Memories,” with its conveying of the breathless emotions of two young people “sitting in the opera house, the opera house, the opera house / A-waiting for the curtain to arise” is something I wouldn’t dare try at home, even in the shower!

One of the most memorable moments in the recital is Hampson’s pure, dignified version of “Sing God a Simple Song (Lauda, Laude)” from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971). That, and the songs “God Be in My Heart” (Elinor Remick Warren, to an anonymous 16th Century lyric) and “A Time for Farewell” (Jay Ungar/Cleo Laine) with its gently lilting rhythm, are likely to leave the listener in a mood of love and generosity toward all of mankind. (In my case, the feeling did not extend as far as the Republican Party. Even the magic of great music has its limits.)