between the shore and the ships –
The Grand-Pré Recordings
Helen Pridmore; Wesley Ferreira
Centrediscs CMCCD 17912
The fallout from the Acadian expulsion haunts Canadian amour-propre to this day. That is the fact lurking behind a release from Centrediscs called between the shore and the ships, a loose cycle of settings for voice and clarinet by eight Eastern-Canadian composers and performed with fitting solemnity by Helen Pridmore and Wesley Ferreira. The texts are varied and range from an extract from Longfellow’s Evangeline to contemporary reflections like Mouvence by Gerald Leblanc. The compositional range is somewhat narrower and though the pairing is highly effective — composers have often been drawn to the matching character of soprano and clarinet — the material rarely strays from dour and dreary elongations of vocal line and wandering clarinet decoration. A welcome change is the above-mentioned Mouvence as set by Jérôme Blais. The text is mysterious and fresh; he sets it for spoken voice and largely improvised bass clarinet. Interestingly, the only francophone composer to be included chooses a text that “carries the essence of the Acadian tragedy without ever referring to it directly.” Could the rest be too earnest in their expressions of retroactive guilt?
Singer Pridmore is fearless faced with repeated demands for expressive vowelizations entwining with a clarinet accompaniment that is sometimes played for pleasing dissonances: a challenge for the singer and usually rewarding for the listener. Her tone is on occasion nasal and raw and her pitch suffers in a number of instances, most noticeably the Robert Bauer setting of the Dykes of Acadie. Ferreira has a beautiful and controlled sound that he uses to support as well as he can the soprano and which he highlights beautifully in his solo passages. The overall effect is strong, but I have the urge to go hear some Zydeco and eat some blackened catfish just to feel better.
