“And If the Song
Be Worth a Smile”

It’s beyond any doubt that the American art song has flourished mightily in recent decades, and the flow of creativity continues unabated, as American composers active today apply their artistic zeal to this most intimate of musical forms. Soprano Lisa Delan and friends offer here a rich and varied sampling of this abundance of fine songs by living Americans, many based in the San Francisco Bay Area, including works written especially for her in a process of close artistic collaboration. (All of these songs, with the exception of those by William Bolcom and Jake Heggie, are recorded here for the first time.)
William Bolcom (named 2007 Composer of the Year by the prestigious publication Musical America) leads the way with four selections from his well known, two-volume set of “Cabaret Songs“ (1977-85), originally written for his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. The savvy lyrics are by the late playwright and librettist Arnold Weinstein (1927-2005), who collaborated with Bolcom on his operas McTeague, A View from the Bridge, and A Wedding. Many of these cabaret songs evoke the complex emotional terrain inhabited by the modern liberated woman, à la “Sex in the City.” In the delightfully sensual “Amor,” a pleased-with-herself beauty (rather like a languid version of Musetta in La Bohème) gloats at the wide admiration her irresistible charms inspire. “Oh, Close the Curtain” is a boozy, conflicted and wistful recollection of a wild, posh party. By contrast, “Waitin” affords a quiet moment of hope and faith in the simple style of a gospel song. An awkward scene of morning-after regrets following a night of so-so sex unfolds in “Toothbrush Time.”
Noted San Francisco composer Gordon Getty (honored as an Outstanding American Composer at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1986) offers his latest set of songs, “Poor Peter” (March 2008). Setting his own poems in these songs written for Ms. Delan, Getty conjures a vision of Merrie Olde England through the crystalline prism of his crisp, uncluttered modern sound, beginning with the delicately shifting chromatics of “Where is My Lady?” A wry twist on an old-fashioned English dancing song, “Tune the Fiddle” offers some clever rhythmic surprises, while “The Ballad of Poor Peter” is a halting, enigmatically haunting beggar’s plea. Its final stanza provides the title for this recoding: “And if the song be worth a tear/Or yet a smile/Then grant Poor Peter but a penny . . . .”
Jake Heggie, another San Franciscan, catapulted to prominence with the phenomenal success of his first opera, Dead Man Walking, premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2000, but his career as a successful songwriter was well under way years earlier, as he found friendly collaborators among many well known American singers. Arching lyricism characterizes “My true love hath my heart” (1996), inspired by the lovely simplicity of an Elizabethan poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). Originally a solo song with cello and piano accompaniment, it is heard here in the composer’s own arrangement for vocal duet, featuring acclaimed mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer, a frequent performer at the Metropolitan Opera and major houses internationally, along with Israeli-born, Harvard trained cellist Matt Haimovitz, who is currently Professor of Cello at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec. A student of the late Leonard Rose, Matt played Carnegie Hall at age 13; he has lately been active in bringing his solo cello performances to non-classical venues such as jazz and rock clubs, taverns and coffeehouses across North America.
Heggie’s “Three Folk Songs” (1994), arrangements of familiar American tunes, were originally created for famed mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. The first, “Barb’ry Allen,” gives the familiar plaintive ballade fresh eloquence. An expressive piano part underscores the heartfelt pining of “He’s Gone Away,” and the near-nonsensical chatterings of “The Leather-Winged Bat” are dressed in cheekily sparkling accompaniment figures.
“Annettes-Lieder,” by David Garner, are songs commissioned and premiered by Mimi Ruiz in 1986. Professor Garner has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music since 1979, and was the 1997 recipient of the George Sarlo Family Foundation Outstanding Professor Award. His wide-ranging and multi-faceted output spanning the past two decades includes vocal chamber music in Spanish, Catalan, German, Renaissance Italian, Modern Greek and Japanese. Scored for piano and cello accompaniment (again featuring Mr. Haimovitz), “Annettes-Lieder” treat poems by the gifted German writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848), whose deep religious conviction infuses her works. In “Im Grase” (In the Meadow), Garner’s gently floating figures create a lilting reverie mingling thoughts of natural beauty with spiritual longing. Jagged cross-rhythms underscore the turbulent outpouring of “Am Turm” (On the Tower), as Ms. Droste-Hülshoff gives voice to a sheltered 19th-Century woman’s fervid cry for the wild adventures then reserved to men. By contrast, a gentle rustling quality gives peaceful tranquility to “Der Weiher” (The Pond).
John Corigliano’s preeminence among living American composers has been confirmed by numerous honors, including several Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No.2 (2001), a Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No.1 (1991), an Academy Award for his score to Francois Girard's 1997 film The Red Violin, and the designation as Musical America’s first-ever Composer of the Year in 1994. His opera The Ghosts of Versailles, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (1991), has met with huge success. His ventures into the world of cabaret songs, delving into the subject matter of modern classical music itself, are heard here, with witty texts by his longtime partner Mark Adamo, composer of the frequently performed opera Little Women (1998).
“Dodecaphonia” or “They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose” (1997)—originally composed for the same team represented by the songs that begin this album, William Bolcom and Joan Morris—cleverly pokes fun at the 20th-Century German atonal or “twelve-tone” school of composition championed by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern (can you spot the “tone row”?) and finds time to lampoon the endless repetitions of modern minimalist composers as well. “Marvelous Invention” (2001) has some fun imagining a stylish woman on the telephone rhapsodizing about the (supposed) delights of her new iPod-style music player, rattling off a modern “Who’s Who” of performers and composers (including Corigliano himself, of course).
A composer whose distinctive new voice has won wide recognition across North America and Europe, Luna Pearl Woolf holds degrees in composition from Harvard University (1996) and Smith College (2002). She received the Ellen Taafe Zwilich Prize from the International League of Women Composers in 1993, and the Settie Lehman Fatman Prize for composition in large form from Smith College in 2002. She and her husband, this recording’s cellist Matt Haimovitz, whom she met at Harvard, work to bring classical music to a younger, hipper audience. “Odas de Todo el Mundo” (Odes for Everyone), commissioned by Lisa Delan, sets an evocative poem by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Woolf captures the wide-ranging moods of the poem, mixing spicy Latin dance rhythms, dry insouciance and pensive melancholy.

© 2008 Clifford Cranna

top