03 Henze Nachtstucke und ArienHenze – Nachtstücke und Arien; Los Caprichos; Englische Liebeslieder
Narek Hakhnazaryan; Juliane Banse; Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien; Marin Alsop
Naxos 8574181 (naxosdirect.com/search/747313418176)

Right from the start of Hans Werner Henze’s long and productive career, performers and audiences have connected viscerally with his music – some of the most lyrical, complex, passionate, committed, literate, uncompromising, provocative, confrontational and powerful of its time. Today, ten years after his death, it speaks to us just as directly as ever. 

The works on this recording were never among Henze’s best-known pieces, compelling though all three are. The one I find most moving is Englische Liebeslieder. This collection of love songs is based on poems by Shakespeare, the Earl of Rochester, Joyce and Graves. But the texts are never actually heard. Instead, they are interpreted by a solo cello. With cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan’s open-hearted lyricism, and the responsiveness of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony under chief conductor Marin Alsop, the effect is uncannily intimate – and utterly ravishing. 

In Nachtstücke und Arien, the arias are sung, to exquisite poems by Ingeborg Bachmann. But here the three dreamy instrumental movements work better than the two wistful arias. Soprano Juliane Banse captures the essential theatricality of Henze’s style. But her shrillness and pronounced vibrato dampen the mystery and magic for me.

Los Caprichos transports us to the world of foolishness and folly depicted in Goya’s series of 80 etchings of the same name. Under Alsop’s insightful direction the orchestra captures Henze’s brilliant characterizations, shapely phrases and delightfully clear textures, making this a disc well worth seeking out.

04 Sasha Cookehow do I find you
Sasha Cooke; Kirill Kuzmin
Pentatone PTC 5186961 (pentatonemusic.com/product/how-do-i-find-you)

American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke is a two-time Grammy Award winner. Her most recent album, how do I find you, features songs composed by numerous living American composers (Missy Mazzoli, Rene Orth, Frances Pollock, Hilary Purrington, Kamala Sankaram and Caroline Shaw) and written by many living American and Canadian poets and lyricists (Liza Balkan, Mark Campbell, David Henry Hwang and Colleen Murphy).

howdDo I find you is a digital only release in which Cooke partners up with collaborative pianist and Houston Grand Opera principal coach Kirill Kuzmin. Together, they perform 17 newly composed songs commissioned and curated by Cooke during the COVID-19 pandemic. Composers were given the opportunity to write about topics that spoke to them most during the pandemic and this resulted in a wide variety of themes related to the use of social media, social injustice, immigration and environmental concerns, as well as the familiar pandemic themes of working from home, work insecurity, pandemic parenting, general struggles and personal sacrifices. 

Although Cooke’s voice would gain from light text setting revisions and her interpretation of raw and unhinged feelings is, at times, too measured (Dear Colleagues), how do I find you is a compelling album. With music firmly situated in the contemporary American art-song style and up to date lyrics, Cooke and Kuzmin’s interpretations successfully portray the intricacies of pandemic life with relatable depth, seriousness, sarcasm and humour.

05 DiDonato EdenEDEN
Joyce DiDonato; Il Pomo D’Oro; Maxim Emelyanychev
Erato (joycedidonato.com/2021/12/07/eden)

Joyce DiDonato’s Eden invites us to examine our relationships and connections to the natural world by exploring themes of identity and belonging as well as our role and purpose in the healing of our planet, ourselves and one another. 

The repertoire offered crosses musical genres and eras, from classical Baroque songs from the 17th century to the modern contemporary and jazzy sounds of the 21st. The songs showcase themes of nature that have fascinated numerous composers, from Handel, Gluck and Mysliveček to Mahler, Ives and Copland. Eden also includes a world premiere recording of The First Morning of the World by Rachel Portman and Gene Scheer, commissioned for the album. 

DiDonato is a well-established versatile singer and little can be added to praise the quality of her voice, her technique, her creativity and her artistry, all equally displayed on Eden. Perhaps most notable is the care in curation which results in a cohesive product offering both vocal and instrumental works that efficiently cross the boundaries of musical genres and eras. 

DiDonato’s partners, Ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro and the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, are historical performance practice specialists and this is reflected throughout the album. Gluck’s instrumental piece Danza degli spettri e delle furie is especially delightful.

06 Rags to RichesFrom Rags to Riches – 100 Years of American Song
Stephanie Blythe; William Burden; Steven Blier
NYFOS Records n/a (nyfos.org)

This debut album from the New York Festival of Song’s new in-house label NYFOS Records features mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and tenor William Burden accompanied on piano by NYFOS artistic director/co-founder Steven Blier, who also arranged some of the songs. It is taken from a March 2000 live concert recording at Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York celebrating 20th-century American songs including art song, musical theatre, jazz and opera. 

The opening track has happy, energetic Blythe solo vocals in a dance-along rendition of Joplin’s Pineapple Rag, arranged by Blier. Blier’s arrangement of Cook’s vaudeville My Lady Frog is amazing, with opening piano leaping frog line, Burden’s musical singing to higher tenor closing pitches and closing ragtime piano riff. Bernstein’s Broadway song Wrong Note Rag provides a fun change of pace with piano “wrong note chords” hilarious under the vocalists. Nice to hear a more classical piece in the mix here with Samuel Barber’s Nocturne for tenor and piano. Other songs include works by Gershwin, Monk, Weill, Rodgers, Sondheim and Bolcom

The 17 songs comprise a comprehensive, stylistically wide-ranging overview of American songs composed in the last century. Blythe and Burden both sing with clear pitch, articulation and musicality in all the diverse styles. Blier’s rock-solid technique, musicality, accompanying and humour is amazing. His arrangements are musically inspiring. This is a superb release from a live production that includes occasional audience applause. Bravo!

Listen to 'From Rags to Riches: 100 Years of American Song' Now in the Listening Room

01 Jeanine de BiqueMirrors
Jeanine De Bique; Concerto Koln; Luca Quintavalle
Berlin Classics (berlin-classics-music.com)

Mirrors is Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique’s debut album. Accompanied by the renowned Baroque orchestra Concerto Köln, with musical direction by Luca Quintavalle, the album focuses on Baroque arias and includes three world premiere recordings.

De Bique’s album reflects her unique style and personality in a well-crafted concept. Her flawless technique is impressive and includes carefully sculpted notes and stunning articulation amid invigorating Baroque rhythms and flying high notes. De Bique, a seasoned Handel performer, was also given the freedom to play with and create new ornamentation for each aria.

Developed in collaboration with musicologist Yannis François, the concept of the album is that of looking through a broken mirror; different settings of the same libretti are placed side by side on an album for the first time. Mirrors juxtaposes Handel’s operatic heroines Alcina, Cleopatra, Deidami, and Rodelinda with the same characters’ arias from the works of Riccardo Broschi (brother of famed castrato Farinelli), Carl Heinrich Graun, Gennaro Manna and Georg Philipp Telemann, each prominent opera composers of their time. The arias of Mirrors are meant to relate key moments in the psychological development of each heroine, thereby also opening a window into the varied female experience. In the liner notes De Bique writes that this project allowed her to sing from a place of vulnerability and that she was “given the opportunity to be a voice for women across the ages who are still trying to find spaces to free their voices, and for those ready to reclaim their autonomy.”

02 Verdi MacbethVerdi – Macbeth
Soloists; Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini; Coro del Teatro Regio Parma; Roberto Abbado
Dynamic DYN-CDS7915.02 (naxosdirect.com/search/dyn-cds7915.02)

My love for Verdi’s Macbeth began here in Toronto many years ago when I saw Hungarian soprano sensation Georgina Lukács in the famous Mad Scene, the late Richard Bradshaw conducting with such a rapport between them that it seemed like he was conducting just for her. Today my love has been rekindled with this new CD from Parma. Parma is now what Salzburg is to Mozart or Bayreuth to Wagner, a Verdi Mecca.

Success for Macbeth was a long time coming. In 1847, it was the first time Verdi tried to tackle Shakespeare, his idol since childhood, but the atmosphere of foggy, rainy Scotland plus the witches didn’t please the Italian public. However in 1865, a golden opportunity came from Paris and big money too. He revised the opera by translating it into French, adding new music and a mandatory ballet to suit the taste of Paris. This version fared better and it is presented here.

This is an open air concert performance no doubt necessitated by COVID, using Parma’s resplendent Opera House as a backdrop and with the best singers available. Perhaps the greatest Verdi baritone alive, Ludovic Tézier from Marseille, with his velvety, many shaded but strong voice, simply lives the title role. His bloodthirsty wife and helpmate, Lady Macbeth, is sung by Sylvia Dalla Benetta who is rapidly becoming Italy’s leading dramatic soprano. She is sensational with a tremendously wide vocal range and power. Her high notes could shatter glass and her low notes are bloodcurdling. Her first scene and the cabaletta Viens! Viens! Sois homme! Il faut régner is explosive. Riccardo Zanellato’s smooth basso is heartrending as Banquo. Scholarly conductor and Verdi expert Roberto Abbado conducts with throbbing vitality.

03 Renee Fleming Nezet SeguinVoice of Nature: The Anthropocene
Renée Fleming; Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Decca Classics (deccaclassics.com/de/kuenstler/reneefleming)

Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene is another album responding to the devastating current pandemic. According to celebrated veteran American opera diva Renée Fleming it was inspired by the solace she found while hiking near her Virginia home during lockdown. Canadian conductor and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Fleming have chosen 16 songs which feature lyrics exploring “the centrality of nature in Romantic-era song and highlight[ing] the peril … of the natural world today. … Now, in the Anthropocene, we see the effects of our own activity, and the fragility of our environment,” reflects Fleming.

A dedicated performer of art song, she draws on her classical repertoire including scores by Liszt, Grieg, Fauré and Hahn for the core of this recital. Also featured are recording premieres of Caroline Shaw’s 2017 Aurora Borealis, evoking flickering lights in the northern sky, plus two commissions from American composers. 

Pulitzer Prize-winner Kevin Puts gives Evening by the American poet Dorianne Laux a retro-musical setting, characterized by a supple lyric soprano melody highlighted by Fleming’s soaring high notes, and supported by Nézet-Séguin’s rippling tonal arpeggios and harmonies. 

Nico Muhly’s bricolage-like Endless Space, on the other hand, draws on several disparate texts: poetry of the 17th-century English theologian Thomas Traherne plus writing by climate change journalist Robinson Meyer. It starts with a sort of recitative before taking advantage of Fleming’s core vocal strengths still at her command in her sixth decade: velvety rich lows, graceful high passages, flawless intonation and dynamic control.

04 Cassidy The Mass jpegPatrick Cassidy – The Mass
Laude; David Harris; Christoph Bull
Supertrain Records (supertrainrecords.com)

The Catholic Mass is one of the most frequently set texts in the history of music, encompassing works ranging from the 14th century to modern times. Whether Palestrina’s marvellous Missa Papae Marcelli or Beethoven’s grandiose Missa Solemnis, performances and recordings of these masterpieces bear testament to the inspirational power of these ancient rites and texts. 

Unique among the plethora of recordings of the Mass, however, is this documentation of Patrick Cassidy’s The Mass, originally composed for choir and orchestra and later adapted for choir and organ. Growing from the challenges of quarantine, it is perhaps among the first major works in history to be recorded virtually, with each member of the choral group singing their individual part in isolation. Anyone who has worked on a virtual choir project is aware of how involved, tedious and time-consuming such a task can be, especially when the result is intended to be a release-worthy recording, and the excellence attained in this instance cannot be overstated.

Cassidy’s writing is stunningly beautiful and primarily uses a late-Romantic idiom, with luscious harmonies and gorgeous melodies that are both profound and sublime. The singers, despite their isolation, blend with a precision and clarity that is, in a word, unbelievable, while Christoph Bull, organist-in-residence at the First Congregational Church of Lost Angeles – which houses one of the world’s largest pipe organs – is in fine form, making that single instrument sound as varied and convincing as an entire orchestra.

If the above review sounds almost too good to be true, that is because this recording is as well. This project demonstrates the human potential to persevere, and the spiritual capacity to grow together and bring to light beauty in isolation, regardless of external factors and influences. It is highly recommended to anyone whose spirit needs uplifting, or who simply wants to bathe in the glorious sounds of Cassidy’s Mass.

05 Thomalla Dark SpringHans Thomalla – Dark Spring: Opera in 11 Scenes
Shachar Lavi; Anna Hybiner; Christopher Diffey; Magid El-Bushra; Nationaltheater-Orchester Mannheim; Alan Pierson
Oehms Classics OC 994 (oehmsclassics.de)

The whole idea of Dark Spring as being born of both song and opera is a considerable philosophical and stylistic leap. But what its creator Hans Thomalla achieves in this work is a lofty Singspiel recast as musical meta-theatre. Happily the 11 scenes are acted and/or sung by a fine cast who interact with each other in a deeply emotional manner as this avowed song-opera goes like a bolted arrow directly into the listener’s heart.

Thematically this is a cautionary tale (the word “narrative” is technically more appropriate), one whose four characters we meet at an existential 21st-century crossroad where the theatre of Brecht and the angst of Jean-Paul Sartre collide. The playwright and novelist appear to have inspired Thomalla’s work, an operatic adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891). Dark Spring roars with the socio-political demons that drive our digital media world. Song lyrics by Joshua Clover reflect the shattered mirror of violence, while peer and parental pressures hover dangerously close at hand. 

Relationships crumble in overwrought romanticism and roiling sexuality leading to the climactic suicide of one of the four characters, Moritz, played with explosive combustion by countertenor, Magid El-Bushra. Tenor Christopher Diffey, contralto Anna Hybiner and mezzo-soprano Shachar Lavi sing their respective ways through the storyline that exudes visceral energy throughout Dark Spring. The Nationaltheater-Orchester Mannheim conducted by Alan Pierson shines as it navigates this difficult score.

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