Songs for a New Century
Jonathan Miller; Lucia Lin; Randall Hodgkinson; Marc Ryser
Navona Records nv6623 (navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6623)
Jonathan Miller, long-time Boston Symphony Orchestra cellist and founding artistic director of the Boston Artists Ensemble, commissioned well-established American composers Gabriela Lena Frank and Scott Wheeler along with Judith Weir, Britain’s current Master of the King’s Music, to bring Mendelssohn’s concept of “songs without words” into “a new century.”
The disc opens with Mendelssohn himself, his Song without Words, Op.109 for cello and piano and five Songs without Words for piano, arranged by Mendelssohn’s friend, cellist Alfredo Piatti. Miller and pianist Marc Ryser find some dark drama within these graceful pieces, often considered lightweight.
Miller and violinist Lucia Lin perform Frank’s duo Operetta. I found all five movements pervaded by agitated discontent. Operettas typically attempt to make people smile; this one doesn’t.
Pianist Randall Hodgkinson joins Miller in Weir’s Three Chorales. In Angels Bending Near the Earth, the cello gently swings up and down over piano tinkles. In Death’s Dark Vale moves from gloom to hopefulness. O Sapienza, variations on a Hildegard von Bingen hymn, features long-lined lyricism from the cello amid irregular piano splashes.
Miller and Ryser reunite in Wheeler’s Cello Sonata No.2 “Songs without Words,” composed, writes Wheeler, in his upstate New York woodlands studio. In Among the trees, abrupt piano discords punctuate the perturbed cello line. Unaccompanied pizzicati in the cello’s lowest register dominate Forest at night. The cello resumes its moody musings in Barcarolle before joining with the piano to conclude this CD with lyrical optimism.