Rituals – Art Songs by Charles Ives; Reynaldo Hahn; William Bolcom
Laura Choi Stuart; Tanya Blaich
Acis APL78383 (acisproductions.com/rituals-art-songs-by-ives-hahn-bolcom-laura-choi-stuart-tanya-blaich)
In her first solo CD, American soprano Laura Choi Stuart presents a remarkably variegated program of 26 art songs, non-standard repertoire that celebrates “the rituals of community, relationship and home that make up our days” in “the form of traditions, ceremonies or habits.”
The great American maverick Charles Ives is represented by eight songs. Five are set to his own verses, including nostalgic texts about his own youth, “tunes of long ago” and “tunes we sang in school days,” incorporating musical quotations from familiar hymns and patriotic songs. Ives’ ethical values appear in The Innate – “the things true Pilgrims stand for,” Matthew Arnold’s West London honouring a beggar-woman and Robert Browning’s From “Paracelsus” – “what proportion love should hold with power in man’s right constitution.”
The seven songs of Reynaldo Hahn’s Études latines, set to poems by Charles-Marie-René Compte de Lisle, luxuriate in evoking the aromas and sacred rites associated with the exotic wines and mythical deities of Greek and Roman antiquity. Hahn’s sensual, languorous vocal lines are accompanied throughout by pianist Tanya Blaich’s gentle strumming, as if on an ancient lyre. It’s really quite beautiful.
In Briefly It Comes, Pulitzer-laureate Willam Bolcom’s nine-song cycle set to Jane Kenyon’s poems, Bolcom’s unembellished, conversational music mirrors Kenyon’s quotidian images – pots and pans, eating cereal, walking the dog – embedded in ruminations about poetry’s eternal trinity, Nature, Love and Death. Two of Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs – Waitin and Miracle Song – complete this very entertaining CD.
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