Vocal and Choral

Peter-Anthony Togni – Responsio
Jeff Reilly; Suzie LeBlanc; Andrea Ludwig; Charles Daniels; John Potter
ATMA ACD2 2731

Composer Peter-Anthony Togni has brilliantly created a soundscape spanning the centuries. Togni follows in the compositional footsteps of medieval composers by borrowing, responding and drawing on Guillaume de Machaut’s medieval masterpiece Messe de Nostre Dame (circa 1365). The surprising success of Responsio lies in the strength of Togni’s writing as he then combines and contrasts this medieval groundwork with musical ideas from the intervening centuries.

The vocal quartet score features beautifully crafted four-part, chant-based writing that transcends stylistic periods, with especially dreamy harmonies and luscious counterpoint in the Machaut-based sections. The written and improvisational bass clarinet part moves the 12-section work through the musical centuries into the modern day in a part full of moving reflective passages and fragments of extended contemporary techniques. The best example is the Gloria where the vocalists swiftly and effortlessly switch stylistic tonalities of the centuries while the bass clarinet either supports the singers or works in musical opposition. The section ends with an unexpected yet gratifying bass clarinet blast!

Suzie LeBlanc (soprano), Andrea Ludwig (mezzo-soprano), Charles Daniels (tenor) and John Potter (tenor) are a cohesive vocal quartet with voices that blend tightly together in ensemble and shine as soloists. Bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly is a master of his instrument and the music, and also acts as the recording’s producer.

Dvořák – Alfred: Heroic Opera in Three Acts
Froese; Bothmer; Rumpf; Sabrowski; Mikuláš; Unger; Baxová; Prague RSO; Heiko Mathias Förster
ArcoDiva UP 0140-2 612 (arcodiva.cz)

Alfred is the earliest of Dvořák’s eleven operas. It is the only one with a German libretto. It remained unperformed until 1938, when (a few months before the German invasion) it was premiered, in a Czech translation, at Olomous. The performance on these CDs was recorded live in September 2014. It is the first performance to use the original German libretto.

Of Dvořák’s operas only Rusalka has held the stage and that largely because of the soprano aria, the Song to the Moon. I have, however, good memories of a production of The Jacobin by the Welsh National opera. Alfred was new to me as it will be to most. It presents a semi-historical account of the Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Danes under King Alfred in the ninth century. The musical idiom recalls French grand opera and early Wagner (the Wagner of Rienzi rather than the composer of Lohengrin). The CD booklet comes with a short essay by David R. Beveridge, who claims modestly, “Alfred is an uneven work, and nobody will claim that we have here a neglected masterpiece.” He then compensates for that comment by adding, “Yet it contains many passages of breath-taking beauty.” I am afraid these moments passed me by. Nevertheless this recording should be of interest to anyone who wishes to explore Dvořák’s earlier work. It is given a fine performance by singers and orchestra alike. The tenor, Ferdinand von Bothmer, is especially good in the role of the (fictional) Danish commander Harald.

Strauss – Feuersnot
Carbone; Henschel; Wawiloff; Amoretti; Teatro Massimo; Gabriele Ferro
ArtHaus Musik 109065

A handsome suitor unwisely steals a kiss from a girl in the heat of passion whereby she vows revenge and publicly humiliates the young man by leaving him hanging in a basket just below her window. The unfortunate young fellow (actually a wizard and a powerful magician) lays a curse on the town by extinguishing all fires and plunging it into eternal darkness. The young Richard Strauss’ second, almost unknown opera was chosen by Teatro Massimo, the beautiful opera house of Palermo, Sicily to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday. This Italian production is inspiringly directed by the formidably talented Emma Dante who engulfs the entire stage in a burst of colour and incessant movement and dancing, because this is Midsummer Night, a night of love.

The opera is Strauss’ revenge on the philistine burghers of Munich who made Richard Wagner leave in disgrace and booed Strauss’ first opera off the stage. Strauss (another Richard!) also quit Munich and wrote Feuersnot (Lack of Fire) and triumphed with it in 1902, in Dresden. Sumptuous music, full of melody interspersed with sudden outbursts of waltzes, soaring into a glorious climax at the end when the lovers finally unite and embrace. Italian conductor Gabriele Ferro, 80 years young, makes the music shimmer and pulsate with passion. A cast of thousands, soloists, chorus, dancers plus an omnipresent children’s choir singing like angels, makes the show like a fairy tale. Soprano Nicola Beller Carbone, the haughty maiden, is alternately furious, mischievous and funny, eventually surrendering to love in this very taxing role. The handsome wizard cum lover Kunrad, acrobatic German baritone Dietrich Henschel, is a worthy foil to her who manages to carry a tune and roar over the crowded stage while hanging in a basket suspended high in the air.

Aria – Nicholas Isherwood performs John Cage
Nicholas Isherwood
BIS BIS-2149

To say that for many music lovers the music of John Cage is an acquired taste is to gloss over the intellectual charge contained within it. Cage was a fearless experimenter and many of his compositions were more of a “project” than a piece of music. Take the title piece Aria, augmented with bizarre tape snippets (Fontana Mix), as restored in 2009 by Gianluca Verlingieri. The sheer audacity of the piece, given it was created in 1958, “for a voice in any range” is enough to give us pause. This album takes us through 43 years of music and includes Cage’s settings from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

It may come as a surprise, given his post-modern inclinations that Cage treated the human voice in the very same way the composers of the Baroque did – as yet another instrument, to be tuned and used to its limits. His favourite instrument was actually the voice of Cathy Berberian, for whom Aria was written. On this recording, Isherwood proves himself to be an attentive custodian of Cage’s music. In the unpublished Chant with Claps, his folksy rendition brings to mind some of the recordings of Appalachian songs by Custer LaRue and emphasizes the improbable: John Cage, the composer, the experimenter, the rebel, the visionary was also a balladeer. This is a great education for the ears – wide open.

Charles Heller – Tramvay Lider
Charles Heller; Bram Goldhammer
Independent (ecanthuspress.com)

Riding transit at rush hour or late at night is rarely fun (save the rare times one encounters live music and dancing on a subway car). A sea of weary, sallow faces (is it the lighting?) can certainly make one feel equally grey and tired but it must have been far more grim during the Great Depression in Toronto. One streetcar conductor, Shimen Nepom, member of a far-left group known as the Proletarian Poets, decided to mine his oftentimes frigid and tedious journey by turning his experiences into a set of Yiddish poems entitled Tramvay Lider (Streetcar Songs), published in 1940 by the Toronto Labour League. Seventy years later, composer Charles Heller learned of Nepom through Gerry Kane, a columnist with the Canadian Jewish News who remembered meeting Nepom when he was a young boy riding the streetcar with his father. Heller then researched the poems, set them to music and now performs them eloquently, yet characteristically on this recording, accompanied by pianist Bram Goldhammer and cellist Rachel Pomedli. The music evokes the clattering tracks, the ringing bells, the bitter winds, but best of all, the poignant stories of the great variety of people who rode the College streetcar back then.

Songs from the Rainshadow’s Edge – a song cycle by Benton Roark
Arkora
Redshift Records TK444 (redshiftmusic.org)

Anyone who has lived in Vancouver will be familiar with the term “rainshadow” which, in turn, conveys the elusiveness of sunshine. This lends a rather dreamy, mystical aura to the area and the rainshadow’s edge mirrors that same misty, shimmering border between contrasting states of the psyche. Scored for soprano, flute, viola, bass, electric guitar, percussion and narrator, drawing on texts by Huxley, Carroll, Eckhart, Sartre and composer Benton Roark, the multi-layered five-part song cycle takes the listener on a Jungian journey beyond the edge and back again.

The composer, who based the work on his recollection of a state of depersonalization after a series of crises, did well in selecting the ensemble to perform it. Arkora, a self-described new music collective dedicated to contemporary vocal chamber music in its many forms and led by soprano Kathleen Allan, clearly possesses the fluidity to skillfully evoke the surreal experience of “loss of self” and the struggle between inner and outer realities. Allan’s purity of vocal tone is perfection in its adaptations through the ever-changing mix of genres and mysterious landscape of instrumental timbre.

Emilio de Cavalieri – Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo
Soloists; Staatsopernchor Berlin; Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin; René Jacobs
harmonia mundi 902200.01

Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (1600) dramatizes how the Body and the Soul both reject the blandishments of Pleasure and of Worldly Life and choose Eternal Life over Damnation. Such a summary makes the work seem very dreary but it can hold the attention of a modern audience, as was demonstrated by the Canadian Opera Company in its 1983/84 season. Although the Rappresentatione is not, in my view, an opera, it undoubtedly influenced that newly emerging genre through its staging and through its use of solo singing with chordal accompaniment.

Both the singing and the instrumental playing on this CD are very fine. The performance is based on that of a production at the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 2012. Although the work’s first publication provided the melody and the bass line, a performance can only be realized by enriching the chords needed and by adding further melodic and contrapuntal lines. There is a great deal of instrumental variety on this recording. Of particular interest is the arch-cittern or ceterone (which bears a similar relationship to the cittern as the theorbo does to the lute). The instrument used here was built for the Musée de la Musique in Paris on the basis of an original preserved in Florence.