Vocal and Choral

Jules Massenet – Intégrale des mélodies pour voix et piano
Various Artists
ATMA ACD2 2411 (atmaclassique.com/en)

The prospect of even approaching a presentation as epic in scope as this 13CD box set, Intégrale des mélodies pour voix et piano from the pen of Jules Massenet, is utterly daunting. The reason is that the reviewer is, to paraphrase the words of Pliny, “being choked with gold.” This is not such a hyperbolic metaphor once you traverse this repertoire. The majestic sweep of these songs is the more significant when you consider that Massenet was once pilloried as “Mademoiselle Wagner” with a style of light, lyrical “saccharine” music. Green-eyed comments such as those are only some of the epithets that were directed at one of 19th century France’s finest and most prolific composers of oratorios and opera, examples of which include Manon, Werther and the now-celebrated Thaïs. 

With the soaring arias in those operas, Massenet redefined the lyrical French tradition – the tradition of Gounod – in the light of Wagner’s advances in dramatic structure. This “lyric French” tradition clearly also found its way into Massenet’s shorter works – the songs that have been collected and presented in this mammoth set. 

It has often also been said of Massenet that he was uninterested in profundity of any sort, but on evidence contained in these songs it is also clear that few composers have ever created such attractive, lyrical works. The composer Vincent d’Indy also suggested that Massenet’s work had a “discreet and pseudo-religious eroticism” (borne out by his 1872 opera Marie-Magdeleine). This eroticism, together with an affection for orientalism, coloured most of Massenet’s subsequent work – including some of these songs. Massenet never denied or admitted to those characteristics. However, he was openly cynical about pandering to the French taste for religiose themes, even declaring: “I don’t believe in all that creeping Jesus stuff, but the public likes it and we must always agree with the public.”  

Massenet gained a firm handle on operatic scoring and with the inherent melodiousness of the aria form it was only natural that the composer fused his prodigious gift for the lyric and the dramatic into a shorter art song form. He put all of this brilliantly to work in the airborne poetry of the songs that make up the breathtaking repertory of the Intégrale des mélodies. 

There are 333 songs in these 13 CDs. The selection constitutes an almost complete edition of Massenet’s shorter work. The box also includes 13 unpublished and 31 never-before recorded songs. In short the box has epic proportions by any standard applied to any one musical genre – in this case, the song form. Each of the CDs features marquee-worthy stars including the great Canadian coloratura Karina Gauvin (cue L’Inquiétude and Le soir from CD 2). Of course Gauvin is not the only celebrity soprano featured here. Others include the quite brilliant Magali Simard-Galdès (Voix de femmes, CD 9). Still others include: mezzo Julie Boulianne (Avant la bataille, CD 10), contralto Florence Bourget (Le Noël des humbles, CD 5). Tenors include Eric Laporte (Napolitana, CD 2), while baritones feature Jean-François Lapointe (Amoureaux d’une étoile, CD 12), and among the narrators is Jean Marchand (Le vision de Loti, CD 12). 

While the vocalists are indubitably the stars on these discs the accompanists also deserve special mention. The cast of musicians includes violinist Antoine Bareil, cellist Stéphane Tétreault, guitarist David Jacques, harpist Valérie Milot and Olivier Godin who plays a radiant 1854 Sébastien Érard piano, harmonium and harpsichord. All the accompanists play with sublime idiomatic grace and must be recognised for their restrained artistry, which allows the vocalists to shine through the poesy of these works. Rarely has any box of CDs offered the kind of thrill-a-minute listening as this one.

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Artur Schnabel – Complete Vocal Works
Sara Couden; Jenny Lin
Steinway & Sons 30208 (steinway.com/music-and-artists/label)

In his book The Great Pianists, music critic Harold Schonberg devoted an entire chapter to Austrian Artur Schnabel (1882-1951), the first to record all 32 Beethoven sonatas. (I especially cherish his soul-searching Schubert recordings.) Yet now almost forgotten is that Schnabel also composed – a lot! – including three symphonies and five string quartets. 

This first complete collection of his vocal music memorializes Schnabel’s relationship with contralto Therese Behr, who brought her young accompanist (she was six years older) to public attention. The visually odd couple – Behr six feet tall, Schnabel five-four – married in 1905.

Schnabel composed 22 songs for Behr between 1899 and 1906, influenced by Brahms’ warm lyricism, rather than the febrile emotionalism of Mahler or Richard Strauss. Making her CD debut, American contralto Sara Couden, with her dark sepia timbre, perfectly suits the songs’ restrained, autumnal moods, prevalent even when the texts rhapsodize about the beauties of nature or love’s joys and sorrows. Pianist Jenny Lin admirably provides pianist-composer Schnabel’s often elaborate accompaniments.

Schnabel wasn’t immune, however, to the stylistic revolutions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky preceding World War I. His 22-minute Notturno, Op.16 (1914), written for Behr, marked a significant departure from his previous compositions. In Richard Dehmel’s lengthy poem, the narrator recounts an agonized dream about a dead friend. Dispensing with bar-lines, Schnabel’s music creates metric ambiguity along with discordant touches of the atonality he later firmly embraced. It’s a compelling musical psychodrama.

Milton Babbit – Works for Treble Voice and Piano
Nina Berman; Steve Beck; Eric Huebner
New Focus Recordings FCR349 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) was one of the 20th century’s most significant composers and music theorists, whose analytical work on the music of the Second Viennese School continues to influence theory seminars throughout the world. Babbitt gained notoriety from his 1958 article Who cares if you listen? in which a strong case for the avant-garde composer is made, whether conventional audiences appreciate their efforts or not.

As a composer, Babbitt wrote both electronic and serial works, including the songs contained on this album which span throughout his career. Performed by soprano Nina Berman and pianists Steve Beck and Eric Huebner, this recording provides a window into Babbitt’s inherently complex, yet surprisingly tuneful style of composition. 

Unlike Schoenberg and other proponents of the Second Viennese School, whose 12-tone methods permit some semblance of almost-tonality, the serialist approach employed by Babbitt strips away any reference to earlier systems of melody and harmony. Although the scores themselves are incredibly dense and challenging to execute and the music is undoubtedly atonal, there is much for listeners to focus on, for even the most random and aleatoric method of composition still results in some semblance of both melody and harmony, albeit far removed from the music of earlier times.

Performing and recording music of this complexity is no small feat and Berman, Beck and Huebner deserve double praise: first, for masterfully presenting this collection of 20th-century art song; secondly, for bringing greater awareness to one of the greatest “musician’s musicians” to ever live. While Babbitt publicly eschewed easy accessibility and immediate audience gratification, his music continues to stimulate, challenge and reward musicians brave enough to engage with his masterful body of work.

Maestrino Mozart – Airs d’opera d’un jeune genie
Marie-Eva Munger; Les Boreades de Montreal
ATMA ACD2 2815 (atmaclassique.com/en)

Canadian soprano Marie-Eve Munger presents Maestrino Mozart, a program dedicated exclusively to the arias of a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Accompanied by the equally accomplished ensemble Les Boréades de Montréal and conductor Philippe Bourque, the album includes rarely heard works composed by Mozart between the ages of 12 and 16 years old. 

Munger, already known as a skilled and musical Mozart interpreter, continues to impress, especially in the three arias from Mitridate and in Lucio Silla’s In Un Istante Oh Come – Parto m’affretto. Throughout Maestrino Mozart, Munger’s voice is warm, her technique is flawless and the coloratura light and agile. Her attentive musicological research is shown in the intelligent and careful consideration with which she brings Mozart’s various characters and stories to life. Munger’s accomplishments reach beyond the music presented; Maestrino Mozart shows that Mozart’s early arias, often considered immature and discarded, are in fact rich works encompassing many of the beloved musical elements Mozart develops further in his later works. Maestrino Mozart should not only please Mozart enthusiasts, it is worthy of both discovery and further performances.

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Arias
Jonathan Tetelman; Orquestra Filarmónica de Gran Canaria; Karel Mark Chichon
Deutsche Grammophon 486 2927 (deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/arias-jonathan-tetelman-12721)

Remember in 1990 the famous Three Tenors concert from Rome? An historic occasion that suddenly turned the world’s attention towards opera, especially the tenor voice, the star of just about every opera. Since then there were countless open air concerts with audiences in the thousands cheering wildly in many countries. I just watched one from Sweden, the star being Jonathan Tetelman a rising new tenor. He sang that wonderful love duet from Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera with joy and passionate abandon, a beautifully shaded voice with tenderness and power in all registers.

Tetelman is an American of Chilean origin. Interestingly he was a disc jockey in New York before he found his voice and now, after rigorous training, is a dedicated versatile artist in great demand. This is his debut album – on DG no less! – and we look forward to many more.

The scene is exotic. A gorgeous space-age auditorium with fabulous acousticsin the Canary Islands  with a well-respected figure in the operatic world, British conductor Karel Mark Chrichon, as music director. The 16 arias are well selected to show a cross section of the many sided versatility of Tetelman from gentle lyricism (the flower aria from Bizet’s Carmen) to powerful dramatic outbursts (Puorquoi me reveiller from Massenet’s Werther) of the Italian and French repertoire. This would include Verdi and his followers, Ponchielli, Giordano and Cilea, the Italian Verismo of Mascagni and Puccini and the French Romanticism of Massenet and Bizet as mentioned above. The journey ends suitably with the famous stretta, Di quella pira from Il Trovatore with a glorious high C at the end, every tenor’s dream.

The Joan Beckow Legacy Project
Various Artists
Independent (joanbeckowlegacy.com)

The Joan Beckow Legacy Project commemorates the musical works of composer Joan Beckow who passed away at 88 in January 2021. The album was conceived and musically directed by one of Beckow’s close and longtime friends, Wendy Bross Stuart and her daughter Jessica Stuart. With the composer’s blessing, Bross Stuart, also a pianist on the album, and Jessica Stuart, both a vocalist and producer for the project, recorded and orchestrated 22 of Beckow’s songs. 

Born in Chicago, Beckow was a prolific composer, pianist and singer. She relocated to Canada in her 30s, where she worked with many theatres as a composer and music director. Beckow’s compositions have been performed on stage countless times, but this posthumous album marks the first time her music was professionally recorded. Her legacy includes both liturgical and musical theatre works, and the double disc is divided as such; one focusing on materials more closely related to musical theatre and the other on classical and spiritual songs which include several pieces set to text from the Jewish liturgy. 

The Joan Beckow Legacy Project is a premium offering. Both discs are carefully crafted, from the chosen repertoire and the orchestration to the order of presentation and the combination of singers and instrumentalists. Beckow’s considerable gifts as a composer and lyricist are revealed via numerous songs on the album, notably The Woman I’ll Be, Dwelling Places, Oseh Shalom, A Christmas Wish, Once There Was a Tailor and On the Other Side of Nowhere.

More information on The Joan Beckow Legacy Project, which includes a 25-minute documentary, can be found on the project’s website.

Alice Ping Yee Ho – A Woman’s Voice
Jialiang Zhu; Vania Chan; Katy Clark; Maeve Palmer; Ariadne Lih; Alex Hetherington; Tong Wang; Andrew Ascenzo
Leaf Music LM254 (leaf-music.ca)

One of the most acclaimed composers writing in Canada today, Hong Kong-born Alice Ping Yee Ho continues to write in many musical genres, and her compositions for voice, known for stretching the skills of the most accomplished singers, are complex and colourful. Having enjoyed her Venom of Love Ballet in 2020, Ho’s recent work A Woman’s Voice – Songs and Duets for Voice and Piano is a beautiful and timely addition to the repertoire of contemporary vocal works. Based on texts including ancient Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty, a war poem by English poet Charlotte Mew, as well as Ho’s collaborations with seven Canadian writers from across the country, the 18 songs are a very full listen. 

Reflecting the multicultural fabric of Canadian women, Ho writes in multi-lingual lyrics of English, French and Mandarin reflecting a wide variety of historical styles, using an all-Canadian cast of pianist/vocalist Jialiang Zhu and singers Vania Chan, Katy Clark, Maeve Palmer, Ariadne Lih and Alex Hetherington, with support from pianist Tong Wang and cellist Andrew Ascenzo. Celebrating the “female spirit,” this album enjoys a concert feel, highlighting the varied relationships between women, with song titles ranging from Self-abandonment and Chit-Chat Café to The Madness of Queen Charlotte. A Woman’s Voice is exquisitely delivered, ripe with history and humour.

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