This American songbook has plenty of Melody
Terry Blain delights in the performances by soprano and pianist on this star-spangled selection of songs An American Song Album
Barber: Hermit Songs; Copland: Four Early Songs; Carlisle Floyd: The Mystery; Getty: Goodbye Mr Chips – Kathy’s Aria; Three Welsh Songs, etc.
Heggie: These Strangers; How Well I Knew the Light Melody Moore (soprano), Bradley Moore (piano) Pentatone PTC 5186 770 (hybrid CD/SACD) 82:38 mins
The American soprano Melody Moore has Strauss’s Salome and Wagner’s Senta in her repertoire, and a voice more naturally scaled to opera than to art song. Yet her operatic experience is harnessed to telling effect in ‘At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory’, from the Samuel Barber Hermit Songs which open this recital.
In lock-step with her outstanding accompanist Bradley Moore (no relation) she catches grippingly the upwelling of anxiety expressed in the medieval Irish writer’s words lamenting his lack of spiritual empathy. The visionary declamation of ‘St Ita’s Vision’, the desolation of ‘The Crucifixion’, the smiling companionship of ‘The Monk and his Cat’ – these are all encompassed with sharp intelligence by Moore in a strikingly fresh interpretation of Barber’s cycle.
Bradley Moore’s impeccably structured accompaniments play a major part in mapping out
Jake Heggie’s These Strangers, an interlocking foursong sequence where Moore’s intense soprano scans texts examining the difficulty of making necessary human connections. Her pin-point attack occasionally recalls Birgit Nilsson, but with a warmer tonal patina. The pick of this recital is probably Carlisle
Floyd’s The Mystery: Five Songs of Motherhood, a rarely-performed cycle which Moore delivers with a soaring, passionate commitment. Copland’s Four Early Songs and a clutch of pieces by Gordon Getty, mainly arrangements, complete the programme. The concentrated power and richness of Moore’s voice means this is a recital probably best not played through uninterrupted. But its individual parts are invariably full of interest and vividly communicative artistry. PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
Mason Bates
Mass Transmission; Siren Music; Rag of Ragnar
Isabelle Demers (organ);
Mason Bates (electronics);
Cappella Sf/ragnar Bohlin
Delos DE 3573 54:24 mins
The second most-performed living composer in America, Mason Bates is particularly celebrated for his slick and imaginative integration of electronica into orchestral works (as well as being an acclaimed dance music DJ). This collection of choral compositions follows a slightly different tack, however, placing the focus squarely on the warmth and flexibility of the human voice.
Composed for 12-part a cappella chorus, Sirens (2009) explores different cultural manifestations of these mythical beings through an intriguing mix of texts, including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey, a poem from the South American Quecha people and, not uncontroversially, the ‘fishers of men’ verses from The Gospel According to Matthew. Bates’s style is unambiguously tonal and his harmonies and textures are not especially revolutionary, here bearing strong echoes of Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs. However, Sirens is nonetheless a hugely enjoyable listen and Cappella SF bring wonderful colour and pliancy to Bates’s generous score.
Mass Transmission (2012) for voices, organ and electronics has a touch more bite. The piece explores the true story of a mother and daughter communicating by radio transmission between Holland and Java. The work blends ethereal choral scoring, toccatalike organ passages and cleverlyplaced snatches of radio static, Javanese gamelan music, jungle sonorities and birdsong. The piece is unexpectedly moving and this performance perfectly captures the score’s blend of tenderness and dynamism. A bonus track ‘mashup’, remixing snippets from both compositions, reminds us of Bates’s DJ roots and brings this compelling disc to a playful and uplifting close. Kate Wakeling
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Melody Moore’s operatic experience is effectively harnessed
Bednall • Finzi
Bednall: Nunc Dimittis;
Finzi: Magnificat; Seven Poems of Robert Bridges; Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice; Welcome sweet and sacred feast; My lovely one; God is gone up; White-flowering days; All this night Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge; Trinity Brass/stephen Layton; Asher Oliver, Alexander Hamilton (organ) Hyperion CDA 68222 74:22 mins Cambridge has already paid fulsome choral tribute to Finzi with the choir of St John’s 2001 disc on Naxos. Now the baton passes to Stephen Layton’s crack Trinity team who cover much the same ground but with a few twists. The stand-alone Magnificat, for example, is complemented by
David Bednall’s sympathetically crafted Nunc Dimittis, replete with characteristic Finzian thumbprints yet never courting pastiche.
‘God is gone up’, meanwhile, an exuberant anthem for the feast of music’s patron saint, is gilded with additional brass and percussion.
Of course, the biggest difference is the sound of the choirs: John’s is topped by boy trebles, lending an innocent freshness, while Trinity’s mixed young adults are effortless in the ease with which they respond to Layton’s exacting demands.
The ground is hit running with a Magnificat whose iterations of the word ‘magnify’ explode in radiant exultation, cutting through the impeccably English collegiate timbres that lubricate Finzi’s flowing lines – virile glee animating the graphic word painting of ‘He hath put down the mighty’. Because the tuning is pin-sharp throughout the disc, tuttis really ‘ping’, and Layton’s idiomatically fine-tuned direction lovingly sculpts the rolling contours with the imprimatur of a true connoisseur. ‘God is gone up’ lands a grandly sonorous punch, though it’s constrained by a certain deliberateness; and despite the evident care lavished on them, the seven Bridges settings en masse can’t quite conceal the odd compositional longueur. ‘Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice’, however, signs off absorbingly rapt, and, in its concluding Amen, deliciously deliquescent. Paul Riley PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Josquin
Adieu mes amours; Ave Maria; Mille Regretz; Regretz sans fin; La plus des plus; Nimphes napées; Nymphes des bois; Fortuna desperata; Narvaez: Canción del Emperador, etc. Romain Bockler (baritone), Bor Zuljan (lute); Dulces Exuviae
Ricercar RIC 403 62:52 mins
As well as being the golden boy in the golden age of sacred polyphony, Josquin Des
Pres was also something of the Paul Simon of his day, and his yearningly melancholic songs (for three to six voices) were top of the Renaissance pops. This recording unveils some of his most beguilingly lovely works, adapting them for solo voice with lute accompaniment, the effect of which is to enhance their liquid, melodic lines. Josquin’s haunting five- and six-voice laments, Nymphes des bois and Nimphes napées, for instance, here become achingly personal outpourings of grief compared with the more ethereal-sounding a cappella performances.
Baritone Romain Bockler’s rich, velvet voice captures their predominantly wistful mood, and lutenist Bor Zuljan realises their intricate accompaniments with effortless grace. The voice is a shade dominant in the balance (though this gives the words real immediacy), and Bockler’s use of vibrato occasionally sounds overly Romantic – perhaps an attempt to step away from the ‘whitewashed’ sound more typical of Josquin performances today. Most interesting, though, is Bockler’s liberal ornamentation of the vocal lines which he realises with admirable agility, while Zuljan, drawing on his own research, adds a distinctive colour to several tracks by using frets placed so close to the strings that they buzz like an exotic sitar. Some evidence for both these practices exists in contemporary treatises and lute ‘intabulations’ (highly embellished arrangements of vocal works). The recorded sound has good detail despite the resonant acoustic. In sum, these are revelatory readings to which I’ll return again and again.
Kate Bolton-porciatti PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
György Kurtág
Scenes from a Novel; Eight Duos for Violin and Cimbalom; Seven Songs; In Memory of a Winter Evening; Several Movements from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s ‘Scrapbooks’; Hommage a Berényi Ferenc 70
Viktoriia Vitrenko (soprano), David Grimal (violin), Luigi Gaggero (cimbalom), Niek de Groot
(double bass)
Audite 97.762 61:24 mins
Scenes from a Novel; Three
Old Inscriptions; Seven Songs; Requiem for the Beloved; A Twilight in Winter Recollected; Attila József Fragments; S K Remembrance Noise
Susan Narucki (soprano), Curtis Macomber (violin), Nicholas Tolle (cimbalom), Kathryn Schulmeister (double bass), Donald Berman (piano) Avie AV 2408 64:57 mins It is mystifying that two recordings of György Kurtág’s song cycle Scenes from a Novel Op. 19 should arrive at the same time. But here they are, each paired with further works (some the same, some different) by Hungary’s leading contemporary composer.
Kurtág’s style is as concentrated as Webern, as fantastical as Ligeti and as atmospherically mysterious as Bartók. Most of the individual pieces are barely minutes long, yet every note packs a punch. The songs make intense demands on the voice and the respective sopranos on the two discs offer very different approaches.
Viktoria Vitrenko, on Audite, responds to Scenes from a Novel with a jaw-dropping range of otherworldly sounds, from cabaret-like expression to dazzling dissolutions of tone. On Avie, Susan Narucki has a more operatic tone, perhaps more human. Fantasy seems uppermost for Vitrenko and her instrumentalists; Narucki focuses more on emotion, but offers less colouristic variety, despite lyricism aplenty.
The Duos for Violin and Cimbalom fizz and dazzle on the Audite recording; Avie’s is devoted entirely to songs, among which SK Remembrance Noise, with solo violin, is outstanding, dark and playful at the same time. The Seven Songs Op. 22 with cimbalom are also stunners, perhaps more successful in Vitrenko and Gaggero’s scruff-ofthe-neck rendition.
Audite’s recorded sound is bright and focused, Avie’s warmer but less clear. But Avie wins special plaudits for providing actual translations of the poems. Strange that a western record company would issue songs in Russian and Hungarian without them, but Audite has not. Tsk.
Jessica Duchen
VITRENKO
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
NARUCKI
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Myslive ek
Adamo & Eva
Roberta Mameli, Alice Rossi (soprano), Luciana Mancini (mezzosoprano), Valerio Contaldo (tenor); Il Gardellino/peter Van Heyghen Passacaille PAS 1053 128:68 mins (2 discs) Myslive ek was one of the greatest Czech composers of the 18th century. Admired by Mozart, whom he met in Bologna in 1770, his heyday in Italy as a composer lasted over ten years. His confident handling of the Italian operatic vernacular and clear feeling for dramatic affect not only garnered him enthusiastic audiences, but had a formative impact on the young Mozart.
Adamo ed Eva (Adam and Eve), his third oratorio, was composed for Florence and premiered in 1771. With four solo voices, the work is a long way from the choral canvases championed by Handel, but is rich in the operatic lyricism of the day. The story begins after the fruit of the tree of knowledge has been tasted. In allegorical fashion, angels of Justice and Mercy, while making the failings of Adam and Eve all too evident, secure divine compassion. Myslive ek’s setting is unfailingly attractive, but is overly generous in some extended arias and rarely penetrates the story’s darker side.
Peter Van Heyghen directs Il Gardelino with vigour, and the solo performances are superb. Valerio Contaldo brings an arresting expressive range to the tortured Adam and he is well matched by Luciana Mancini’s Eve; both are very moving in their penitential arias in the second part. Roberta Manelli and Alice Rossi, as the angels of Justice and Mercy, make sterling contributions to what is an impressive ensemble performance somewhat let down by an overly resonant recorded sound which slightly swamps the accompaniment while placing the soloists too far forward. Jan Smaczny PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★
Schubert
Winterreise
Philippe Sly (baritone);
Le Chimera Project
Analekta AN 2 9138 77:32 mins Goodness, what an unexpected recording! Rather than the solitary plod of the song ‘Gute Nacht’, which opens Schubert’s immense, despairing song-cycle, we get a jazzy, instrumental rendition in
7/8 – a jaunty street party. This discombobulates us straight away, and that feeling is never truly dispelled.
The klezmer band is timbrally interesting but doesn’t convey the nuances of Wilhelm Müller’s poetry. The falling tears/raindrops which open ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ are rendered by a somewhat flatulent trombone. The slightly laboured violin and accordion don’t recall the rustling leaves of the ‘Der Lindenbaum’. Some of it works brilliantly; the clarinet transforms ‘Wasserflut’ and ‘Frühlingstraum’, ‘Täuschung’ is magical, and the louder songs generally work well. But the jazzed-up ‘Die Krähe’ belongs in a Fred Astaire film, not here.
And why revert to a plain piano accompaniment in ‘Das Wirtshaus’, 21 songs in?
Sly’s voice can be dramatically effective, but he favours a darkened, ‘yawny’ technique throughout, leaving us longing for more variety of colour, along with clearer German enunciation. The balance with the instruments is variable (that trombone again!).
The greatest loss is Schubert’s harmonies, many of which are altered or omitted. Alongside this, the improvisatory approach needs more finesse; in the opening ‘Gute Nacht’, the original 4/4 lines are shoehorned clumsily into the new
7/8 rhythm. In the closing ‘Gute Nacht’, the original melody clashes with the new harmony. I can imagine that the dually exuberant and sorrowful klezmer world could suit Schubert’s poor wanderer, but it would need a subtler approach than this. Natasha Loges PERFORMANCE ★★
RECORDING ★★★
I and Silence – Women’s Voices in American Song
Songs by Argento, Barber, Copland, Crumb and Lieberson Marta Fontanals-simmons (mezzosoprano), Lana Bode (piano)
Delphian DCD34229 59:46 mins Dominick Argento died earlier this year, and it’s apt that his Pulitzer Prize-winning song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf should be included in this recital. The piece was written for Janet Baker, and though Marta Fontanals-simmons’s mezzo is a touch lighter than Baker’s this has advantages in suggesting the vulnerability of Woolf in the tender retrospection of ‘Parents’. But Fontanals-simmons has plenty of heft in reserve, too. The opening of ‘Fancy’is commanding, and her operatic experience shows in her natural handling of the quasirecitative style Argento uses in setting Woolf’s prose reflections.
Fontanals-simmons is also notably successful in giving shape and structure to the abstruseness of the five Rilke poems set in
Peter Lieberson’s Rilke Songs. Her excellent breath control and an ability to keep full tone on longer notes play a key role in making these elliptical pieces convincing, as does the expertly calibrated playing of pianist Lana Bode.
Of the three Copland songs to texts by Emily Dickinson, ‘Why do they shut me out of heaven?’ explicitly addresses the recital’s examination of ‘the expectations of silence often placed on women, historically and politically’.
It’s a good example of Fontanalssimmons’s tendency to prioritise solidity of vocal production and excellent diction over flashy pointmaking and expressive distortions. She prefers the words and music to do the talking, and they do so eloquently in the touching account of George Crumb’s ‘Let it be forgotten’ which caps this satisfying recital. Terry Blain
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Myrtle & Rose
C Schumann: Lieder; R Schumann: Liederkreis,
Opp. 24 & 39
Kyle Stegall (tenor),
Eric Zivin (fortepiano)
Avie AV2407 59:40 mins
This recording sandwiches five songs by Clara Schumann between two cycles by her husband Robert, the Eichendorffliederkreis Op. 39 and the Heineliederkreis Op. 24.
The American tenor Kyle
Stegall has a sweet-toned, attractive sound, with moments of great tenderness and beauty.
But his interpretative choices are occasionally bewildering. For instance, he chooses to ‘switch off’ his vibrato on the words ‘und meine Seele spannte weit ihre Flügel aus’ (and my soul spread its wings wide) in Schumann’s ‘Mondnacht’, and on the climactic ‘Dich lieb’ ich immerdar’ (I love you forever) in Clara Schumann’s ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’. These end up sounding robotic. The ghostly, austere ‘Auf einer Burg’ on the other hand, is delivered with quite a prosaic sound.
Eric Zivin, on an 1841 Viennese Rausch fortepiano, accompanies Stegall sensitively, if occasionally splashily (for instance, in Clara Schumann’s ‘O Lust, o Lust’ and ‘Lorelei’). The touches of historically-informed practice, such as temporal dislocation (playing leftand right-hand notes separately) are most welcome. There are other insightful and effective solutions, for example a change of an out-ofrange note in Schumann’s ‘Es treibt mich hin’ worked well.
Altogether, I longed for greater variety of colour, dynamics and tempo – the studio could have helped more with some of this. Stegall inevitably sounds nicely lyrical, even when singing the bitter words of Heinrich Heine. The tempos tend to be on the slow side; moments of excitement are quite far apart. Altogether, an appealing recital, but not a revelatory one. Natasha Loges
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★