Kodály Budavári Te Deum (1936) Psalmus Hungaricus Op.13 (1923) Bartók Transylvanian Dances (Erdély táncok) Sz. 96 (1931) Cantata Profana Sz. 94 (1930)
Luiza Fatyol (soprano, Te Deum), Roxana Constantinescu (mezzo-soprano, Te Deum), Marius Vlad (tenor, Te Deum and Psalmus Hungaricus), Ioan Hotea (tenor, Cantata Profana), Bogdan Baciu (baritone, Te Deum and Cantata Profana), Junior VIP, Children’s Choir (Psalmus Hungaricus), Transylvanian State Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra / Lawrence Foster
Pentatone PTC 5187071 [64’14”] Texts and English translations included
Executive & Recording Producer Job Maarse Balance Engineer & Editing Erdo Groot Engineer Lauran Jurrius Recorded May 2022, Radio Studio of Radio Cluj, Romania
Written by Ben Hogwood
What’s the story?
Here is a chance to gain an insight into the choral music of two 20th century Hungarian composers known predominantly for their orchestral works. Bartók and Kodály were born just a year apart, and while their music is fiercely proud of their heritage their musical trajectories extend well beyond Hungary. Kodály stayed largely within Europe but brought back influences from Paris, while Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the US in late 1940.
Psalmus Hungaricus was Kodály’s first major post-war composition, in 1923. It is a landmark in his output, using for its text a Hungarian paraphrase of Psalm 55. Kodály uses a tenor soloist for the central dramatic role, the choir taking up their position as commentators. The Budavári Te Deum, completed 13 years later, marks the 250th anniversary of the liberation of Buda Castle from the Turks. While referencing Gregorian chant, Kodály incorporates references to Hungarian melodies and ornamentations in a dramatic setting.
In 1930 Bartók completed his first major work for chorus and orchestra. Cantata profana has Transylvanian roots, and Oana Andreica’s booklet note gives the context of its libretto, starting from two Romanian ‘colinde’ – ballads sung during the Christmas season but with a wide range of subjects well beyond the birth of Christ. Such is the case here, Bartók dramatising a myth of nine sons turned into stags. The cantata charts their fate and their father’s conflicting emotions, expressed by a baritone soloists. The Transylvanian Dances are a complementary addition, a short trio of works for small orchestra containing five traditional songs.
What’s the music like?
The Budavári Te Deum is a thrilling start to the album. This is red-blooded choral writing, Kodály diving in headlong to a high octane first section. He challenges choir’s higher sections, who respond admirably to the loud dynamic, retaining impressive clarity in the part writing. The work’s climactic points are notable for their power and passion.
This performance of the Psalmus Hungaricus has the authentic inflections to the melody, its bracing start turning to contemplation. Tenor soloist Marius Vlad inhabits the full tone and strong line demanded by Kodály, and sung so memorably by Ernst Haefliger in the legendary recording with Ferenc Fricsay. This makes for a fine digital alternative, with the choral response both full-bodied and unified. The meaningful counterpoint between Vlad and the Transylvanian woodwind in the middle section (Te azért lelkem) is especially memorable.
Bartók’s Cantata profana starts ominously, with an underlying menace that grows steadily as the hunt in the story progresses. Again the choral passages are well drilled, especially when in league with the percussion. The passionate tenor solo (Ioan Hotea) and fulsome bass (Bogdan Baciu) prove to be ideal foils, alighting on some spicy chords. There is little consolation at the end, in spite of the relative calm this performance leaves.
The Transylvanian Dances are over in a flash but leave a charming impression, with rustic themes. The recording is much closer, taking the action indoors to the tavern rather than outside in the wilds.
Does it all work?
Very much so. There is an adjustment to be made for the Transylvanian Dances, with the smaller ensemble and closer recording, but the performances justify the means. The choral works are a resounding success, brilliantly performed and with electric singing from the Transylvania State Philharmonic Choir, especially in the high passages. The orchestra match them under Lawrence Foster, who secures incisive rhythms and impressive clarity from such large forces.
Is it recommended?
It certainly is. This is an enterprising and very accessible coupling of three thrilling choral works, revealing fresh insights into the Hungarian composers.
Listen
Buy
For more information on this release and for purchase options, visit the Pentatone website
Mahler’s Liederabend: A Recreation of Mahler’s Concert in Vienna on 29th January 1905
Mahler Des Knaben Wunderhorn – selection (1892-1901) Kindertotenlieder (1901-4) Vier Rückert-Lieder (1901)
April Fredrick (soprano), Stacey Rishoi (mezzo-soprano), Brennen Guillory (tenor), Gustav Andreasson (bass), Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra / Kenneth Woods
Macky Auditorium, 1595 Pleasant Street, Boulder CO (Links to concert sections embedded below) Saturday 20th May 2023
by Richard Whitehouse
In an event as inclusive as Colorado’s MahlerFest, it was happily inevitable the Liederaband Mahler gave in Vienna on 29th January 1905 be recreated and, while the decision to distribute these songs between four singers was not strictly ‘authentic’, it yet emphasized their variety of thought and expression more readily than had one vocalist been present throughout. What remained consistent was the creative zeal of Mahler at a crucial juncture in his composing, as he left behind the fantastic realm of his earlier music for greater realism and even abstraction.
The first half was of seven songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which collection dominated Mahler’s thinking the previous quarter-century. Two of them are ostensibly dialogues, but the absence of a second singer mattered little when April Fredrick rendered that interaction of the yearning woman with her condemned lover in Lied des Verfolgten im Turm so graphically; as too the more wistful imaginings of separated lovers in Der Schildwache Nachtlied. She also underlined the glancing irony of Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt and the playful whimsy of Rheinlegendchen with understated assurance. Brennen Guillory pointed up the deadpan humour of Trost im Unglück and if Der Tamboursg’sell felt a little too earnest, the stridency that increasingly borders on aggression of Revelge was bracingly delivered.
Here, as elsewhere, adherence to Mahler’s scoring, with its emphasis on woodwind and brass, brought out its evocative quality which outweighed any passing thinness of tone in the strings. This was even less of an issue during the sparser textures of Kindertotenlieder, whose songs find universal truths in Friedrich Rückert’s intimate ruminations. Gustav Andreasson seemed a little raw of timbre in Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n, though the yearning fatalism of Nun seh’ ich wohl, warun so dunkel Flammen was tangibly conveyed, as too was the aching poignancy of Wenn dein Mütterlein. The bittersweet elegance of Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen felt slightly undersold, but not those contrasts of In diesem Wetter as this final heads from fraught anguish toward a repose from which all dread has been wholly eradicated.
Kenneth Woods directed the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra with that unforced rightness evident from his earlier Mahler performances. Never more so than the four Rückert-Lieder which ended this programme – albeit in a discreet but effective reordering from that of 118 years before. Thus, the capricious whimsy of Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! preceded the deft enchantment of Ich atmet einen Linden duft; Stacey Rishoi proving as responsive to these as to Um Mitternacht, with its crepuscular winds and majestic climax with swirling arpeggios on harp and piano. Fittingly, the sequence closed with Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen – the finest of Mahler’s orchestral songs in its rapt serenity, Rishoi’s conveying of Rückert’s otherworldly sentiments more than abetted by Lisa Read’s eloquent cor anglais. If recreating the Liederabend meant no place for Liebst du um Schönheit (now available in a far more idiomatic orchestration by David Matthews), which might have made a pertinent encore), its absence did not lessen the attractions of this enterprising and successful concert.
Gavin Bryars Ensemble; David Wordsworth (conductor); Sarah Gabriel (soprano); David James (countertenor); Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord); The Addison Chamber Choir
Barbican Hall, London, 19 December 2023
Gavin Bryars Ensemble; The Choir with No Name; Streetwise Opera
St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, 9 November 2023
by John Earls. Photo credit (c) John Earls
To see Gavin Bryars’ classic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yetperformed twice in the space of six weeks is quite special. But this is the composer and double bassist’s 80th birthday year, and both concerts were celebrations of that milestone.
Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet is something of a signature composition for Bryars. Many will be familiar with the story of how he was working on a film documentary about people living rough in London in 1971 and was left with an unused tape of a homeless man singing this religious song. He put the 26-second clip on a loop and composed a slowly evolving and haunting orchestral accompaniment that respected the man’s – to use Bryars’ own words – ‘nobility and faith’.
So it was particularly touching to be at a performance on 9th November at London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields church where the Gavin Bryars Ensemble were accompanied by the Choir With No Name, the choir charity for homeless and marginalised people. Starting with the tape of the unnamed man, the ensemble slowly built its accompaniment around it and the choir joined in the refrain to powerful and moving effect.
I should confess that my 1975 Obscure Records version of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet has been a long-cherished part of my record collection. It is coupled with The Sinking of the Titanic, a work inspired by the story that the band on the ‘unsinkable’ liner continued to play as it sank in 1912, and was given an absorbing performance in the first half of this concert along with The Open Road, where the ensemble was joined by Streetwise Opera who work with people who have experienced homelessness.
Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet was also at the centre of another concert by a larger GB Ensemble (extra cello and violas plus piano and percussion) at London’s Barbican Hall on 19th December, where they were joined by the Addison Chamber Choir. Here, the choir were somewhat more refined and restrained in harmonic accompaniment but no less affecting. It was a truly beautiful performance which received a deserved standing ovation.
The Barbican concert also featured Duets from Doctor Ox’s Experiment, five revised duets from Bryars’ 1998 opera sung by soprano Sarah Gabriel and countertenor David James. Whilst musically engaging (particularly the fifth duet) it suffered from the all too familiar issue of not being able to hear Blake Morrison’s libretto clearly enough (the words were printed in the digital programme). There was also a lovely Ramble on Cortona and a dramatic After Handel’s Vesper, a solo harpsichord piece played by Mahan Esfahani. Special mention should be made of James Woodrow on electric guitar whose playing throughout was atmospheric and never obtrusive. Both the concerts concluded joyously with Epilogue from Wonderlawn.
In introducing Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet at the St Martin-in-the-Fields concert Bryars spoke sincerely about how much the piece still means to him after all these years. These two performances amply demonstrated not only how that unknown man’s voice can still touch one’s heart, but why the piece of music that came from it remains so relevant and powerful today.
John Earls is Director of Research at Unite the Union and tweets / updates his ‘X’ content at @john_earls
Pianist Bruce Brubaker is a man who likes a challenge. A prolific and highly respected performer of music by Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk – and recent collaborator with Max Cooper, Brubaker has in recent times turned his attention to the music of Brian Eno. In November he released an album of piano interpretations taken from the former Roxy Music keyboard player’s solo work – including a complete account of the seminal Music For Airports. The album, Eno Piano, has been released on the InFiné label, Arcana sat down with him to discuss the project, gleaning some fascinating insights into Brubaker’s world of contemporary and classical piano playing.
Given his impressive CV up until now, the music of Brian Eno appeared a logical step – albeit not an easy one. The genial pianist takes up the story. “No, because as you know, Music For Airports and almost all of Brian’s earlier work in this ambient area was studio music and he made it without really any kind of reference to live performing. There were no scores, no plan even! On Music For Airports he provides these little drawings showing you about the patterns involved, but the idea of playing it live was really very far away.
The prospect of recording Eno on the piano had great appeal. “I’m fascinated by the idea of using the wrong tools to make this music. In the original they are physical tape loops that have been used to make the sounds of Music For Airports, so when you hear a particular pattern of notes, and it’s repeated, you are literally hearing the same thing – the exact micro timings the exact balances are the same. In our version I’m playing those things by hand each time, so they’re not the same thing. It’s an interesting problem, and I kind of like it!”
It also resonates with Eno’s methods of composition. “You know Brian did that thing with Peter Schmidt called Oblique Strategies, with the deck of cards – one of my very favourite Oblique Strategies is “Repetition is a form of change”. That’s really a big part of this, so even when you use a tape loop, and play the same notes exactly in the same rhythm, exactly the same way, the effect to the listener / human is not exactly the same. We’re impinging on that, in a slightly different way, because now things are not identically the same. Perhaps the listener perceives this, perhaps they don’t. I think all that ambiguity is right in the neighbourhood of what he was doing in the first place.”
Certainly in music of this kind, the fifth instance – for example – of a melodic phrase is very different from the first, because of the listener being more ‘in the zone’. Brubaker agrees. “Absolutely. I think that as each person hears a piece of music, because of all the things you’ve heard before, the place you live, the sound environment you’re in, every single person – as they hear musical sounds – makes a new piece of music by listening. For everybody sitting in a room, at a concert or hearing a recording there’s a somewhat different piece of music being completed as they listen. That appeals very much to me and our sense of our own time, where people’s participation in the process of music is, I think, much greater. It’s not a passive thing. When you’re hearing something like Music For Airports, you really are invited or allowed to be inside and to make those connections yourself. It’s infinitely variable. Then when you come back and hear it again, it will also vary, so if you hear it for the tenth time, you probably don’t hear the same thing as you did in the beginning. I’m thinking of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, where he says something like, “I returned to the books that I read when I was a young man, and I find that they have changed”. Of course, he knows that they haven’t, the physical printed book is exactly the same – but different when he reads it. I think that that’s where we were trying to be with this.” The question also arises that if Brian Eno sat down to write Music For Airports today, we would end up with something very different. “Definitely”, he agrees.
In spite of its ambience, Music For Airports has a number of interpretative issues and is an intense experience for the performer. “One of the challenges was to figure out how much to allow these repetitions of the same material to vary, or how much to try to make them the same. As a human being, if repeat something over and over again, each one will be different. Do you intentionally push them to be different or not? It’s actually not that much different than playing other minimalist or repetitive music like Glass because I think it’s the same thing. I always found in Glass that if you intentionally varied something, it usually seemed like too much. The better way to do it was to be more like an observer and not really a participant. If you can get yourself into a state of being where you’re listening to the sound as it happens, but to be outside and hearing it happen, and then responding to whatever is unequal but not really making it happen. That is true here too, as it goes by, you monitor and notice the things that vary, but you’re not really making them happen. If you try to do that, then it almost always seems like a heavy hand too much.”
Brubaker’s detail is fascinating, as he moves on to consider his topic further. “I guess it’s true of a lot of kinds of art. One of the strange things about music that’s improvised versus music which is planned beforehand is that a lot of the music that we like, which is planned in advance, aspires to a quality of improvisation. Even if you’re listening to a Beethoven symphony, probably the best performance is the one that seems like it’s not written down, the one that seems like it just happened – even though we know that’s not true. If you map that on to the world of movies or theatre, that’s exactly the same, right? In a movie, for the most part, you understand the actors have learned their lines and rehearsed them many times, but if you’re lucky, you forget all about them. You have the sense that whatever the action is, in the scene you’re watching, it’s really happening. The same thing is true in music, you want to be engaged in what’s happening so that it seems like it’s just a spontaneous event.”
Although he cannot remember his first encounter with Eno’s music, Brubaker admits to a connection with the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s. “I did get this idea of trying to play Music For Airports on the piano quite a while ago, but then there always seemed to be this big problem, which was how we can make very long sustained notes, because that’s such a feature of the piece – and some parts of the music actually have human singing. Then I heard this jazz pianist in America play a concert where he had modified one of these devices that electric guitar players use, the E-bow – and cut it down to put on one string inside a piano. He did an improvisation around this long droning note. I started to think maybe you could do that with the piano and use a bunch of E-bows to make long notes. Then almost by chance I was talking to one of the people at my record company who happen to know of an inventor in France, who had started working on a system like this, specifically for the piano. We met and started talking about it, and that is what we used for this album.”
He explains the methodology. “There are these electromagnets suspended over a piano string, and the string is allowed to vibrate either by putting down the pedal on the piano or in some other way where you can raise the damper. The electromagnet creates a signal that causes this vibration in the spring, which can be controlled very specifically with frequency. You can also produce overtones. Then we found with the lower strings, if you continually excite one of those strings, which are wrapped with another kind of metal, you actually get a pulse. This also fascinates me because we’ve never heard a piano string that was vibrating continuously! When you’re hearing piano sounds in a normal piece of music, you’re always just hearing the decay of that sound, you’re not really hearing the impulse and you’re the impulse for just a little tiny bit of time. What we’re doing now is we’re actually making the string vibrate for a long period of time, like you would on a violin. And so, you know, the nature of the tone, in some cases was really surprising because we’ve never heard it before.”
A new instrument, even! “I was joking about this, but I think it’s true. Eno Piano is not just the title of the album, it’s also an instrument. A long time ago Brian said that the studio is a musical instrument, so it is turning it around and showing that an instrument can also be a studio! The way we’re using it is something that really couldn’t have happened very, very long ago.” The emphasis falls on the string part of the piano rather than its percussive element. “There are other examples of course, in John Cage, and the American composer C. Curtis Smith, who wrote a whole bunch of music for pieces of string or fishing line were used inside the piano. I also played a Cage piece where you had to thread the strings through, and we were able to make a long tone that way.”
Brubaker had the pleasure of meeting Cage on several occasions. “I actually played with him a couple of times. I played Radio Music with him once, and a new chamber music piece he had written. I always found his effect was really very powerful and a spark towards something more. This chamber music piece, called Seven, he had notated using a heavy Japanese brush with ink, and so a lot of it was very difficult to read. The brush was irregular and some of the notes were very thick and some of them were very thin and scrappy and you couldn’t really tell what the notes were. I remember saying, “Mr Cage, can you tell me what the notes are in this chord?” He probably gave the ultimate advice that you could give to any musician in any situation. He said, “Just listen, and you’ll know what to do”, which I thought was pretty good. At the time I just wanted him to tell me what the notes were, but he wouldn’t do that!”
He also recalls a musical example. “I played a little solo piece called Dream, with a long meandering melody, a pretty piece like a lot of his music from the 1940s and early 1950s. I played a concert where he was giving a commentary and had played it from memory. One of the audience asked Cage, “What would happen in the performance if the pianist got lost?” Right away Cage said, “That would be wonderful!” That was good – and that touches this illusion of spontaneity, the illusion of something that isn’t planned. By getting lost, you might be found again. Even in the 19th century, it’s pretty well documented that pianists giving concerts from memory was a kind of substitution for people who didn’t improvise. When Liszt played his own music in public, he always held up the score so that people would know he was not improvising. That back and forth between what the music is and how it sounds is something very interesting, especially with the recent importance of sound artists. A lot of these people come from the visual art world, using sound not as music but as something that they can manipulate and sculpt. I think that actually connects back to Brian Eno. You could say he wasn’t really making music but more creating this sound environment, this space to be inside. That boundary between written music and the world of sound has got much closer, and that will probably continue to be the case.”
One of Eno’s more recent compositions, the single-track album Reflection from 2017, comes to mind. “I think that’s the greatest achievement, being on the cusp of paying attention, or not paying attention”. Some of the pieces chosen on Brubaker’s album – By This River and The Chill Air – sound as written. In the live show we are using those two short pieces in the middle of Music For Airports which I was very sceptical about at first, but I think it does help and is good for the audience.”
Though Brubaker’s recent recorded output is more minimal, his background is steeped in classical music. “I trained as a classical pianist, and I taught at Juilliard for a long time. Even now the students I teach really are primarily interested in Beethoven and Liszt, not even going very far into the 20th century. Sometimes I feel like I almost have a double life! When I go out and do my own artistic work it tends to focus on much more recent things, but when I go back to teaching it’s Beethoven all the time. On the other side I still feel there’s a long connection, and that some of the things we’re talking about with non-directional music, which is to be completed by the listener, connect to what was happening in European music, maybe in the 10th and 11th century. If you go back long before the Classical period, before the composer identity was so formed, there were many other ways of making music, and in other musical cultures outside of European music. One of the things that happened, say with minimalism in the 1960s, is that some of that authority of the composer was lessened. It’s not so much a kind of top-down hierarchical format, and instead the listener, the performer are much more included in the complete art. I think that’s a good thing.
We always seem to blame Beethoven, but he really created a kind of art where the composer really was operating as a kind of God and, and making this musical experience where you weren’t really invited to be a participant. I’m probably overstating it a little bit because I think these different ways of using music exist in lots of kinds of music, so you can approach almost any piece with various ways of participating. But I think Glass actually is the one who said that he found that when you listen to a symphony by Beethoven, the climax generally happens at the same place every night and the organisation of the overall peace really remains the same. His contrast was going to see a play by Samuel Beckett, where the play seemed like a different experience each time he saw it. It was much more of a of a network of relationships rather than this narrative of beginning and development and progression to some kind of goal. It was less teleological if you want to go that way! A lot of European art of the 18th and 19th centuries was directed towards a goal, which could be very satisfying, and then there’s some kind of conclusion. On the other side, with a lot of minimalist music and repetitive music, you can argue that there is no ending – and no beginning either. You’re just in the middle. And of course, isn’t that the experience of life? You don’t remember being born and you haven’t died? So here we are, and I think that’s a very appealing art for our time.”
Finally we move on to discuss Brubaker’s work with Max Cooper, where the pair reinterpreted the music of Glass. “That was a really good project for me, I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite unpredictable, because there was this algorithm in use in the software that translated the signals from my piano playing. Every time we did the performance, those signals would vary slightly, depending on the precise touch, the dynamics, everything about the pedalling, and then those signals were controlling Max’s computers and his synthesizers. Every time we did the performance, that information that he received was really quite different, so what I would hear from him was really varying every day. So it was quite unpredictable, and sometimes it was a little confusing because it could be quite chaotic. What you hear on that album is actually a live show from Paris, and he did a little bit of changing because he didn’t like the quality of the sound. It was quite a voyage!”
Brubaker hasn’t spoken to Eno about his new project – yet – but the pair have conversed previously. “He’s working on the rehearsals for The Ship live show, which are using up all his time, as well as a bunch of other things. I started talking to him about this a long time ago, and I think he’s very open to the idea now of other people taking his music. I always wonder about that with very iconic pieces. I did some piano transcriptions of music by Meredith Monk, and that was a very interesting project where she was really very involved. It was complicated for her because she liked the idea that it was going to be her music heard in a different way, but at the same time she really wanted to be sure it was what she wanted. And I think Brian is not like that and has a very different attitude. In that sense, he is probably much open to other possibilities.”
Eno Piano rewards focussed listening – as well as giving the listener the option to draw back and observe from afar. Typically Brubaker, before he goes, is able to introduce another point of reference. “You probably know this piece that Erik Satie wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, called Furniture Music. My understanding is that he wrote it for some kind of art gallery, some kind of show that was being given. He had the musicians in the room, and he told the audience not to pay attention to them – but he got unhappy because when the musicians started to play the audience got quiet! They were listening intently, and Satie was unhappy because he wanted them to ignore it. I rather liked that.”
Soprano Katharine Dain and pianist Sam Armstrong are on the other side of a screen, talking to Arcana from the Netherlands – where Katharine lives, and where Sam stayed during lockdown. Their musical partnership blossomed in that time, yielding the intriguing collection Regards sur l’Infini, grouping songs by Messiaen, Delbos, Debussy, Dutilleux, and Saariaho. The sequel – and principal topic of conversation here – is their new recording Forget This Night, a carefully curated selection of songs by Lili Boulanger, Karol Szymanowski, and Grażyna Bacewicz on 7 Mountain Records. Headed by Boulanger’s special cycle Clairières dans le ciel (Clearings in the sky), its subject matter is very different.
“In some ways we were worried that the music was going to be too similar, very thoughtful and intense”, says Katharine, “which the first one also was. As we went along, we realised that no – thematically and musically, it’s very, very different. It is a continuation, we hope, but not anything directly related to the first. It’s all the kind of material that we gravitate to anyway, and of course it’s helpful to be validated in our choices the first time, to realise that people really do respond to them in the same way that we do if it’s presented thoughtfully and at the best level we’re able to give. For us we had already started to think about the next music we wanted to look at, before we knew the kind of reach our first album would have. Yeah. So this Lili Boulanger cycle was really the beginning of the second project, but it’s already something that you begin to think about when you’ve spent so long on one programme. Your brain immediately starts to wander, and both ours had started to do that!”
Given the intensity of the songs chosen, and their heady, emotional content, did the music take a toll on the performers? “The Boulanger cycle is particularly intense,” agrees Sam, “and it’s great to see Boulanger getting much more exposure in concerts and also recordings. With this cycle the emotional scope doesn’t fully reveal itself unless you hear all 13 songs together. The last song is devastating, and Katharine doesn’t always make it with dry eyes. It’s a really intense cycle.”
The fact we have any music at all from Lili Boulanger is remarkable, given her story of life and death from tuberculosis at the age of 24. “I think so too”, agrees Katherine. “Before we embarked on this project, I knew her name and a few pieces, but didn’t really know a lot of her music. I had been influenced, I realised in retrospect, by this idea of her as a fragile flower who died before she could really do anything significant. I couldn’t disagree more with that now that I do, but it took some real investigation of the music itself, of what turned out to be a major work. As Sam said, you don’t know it unless you go into it completely and find out what’s there. It was a real revelation, worth all the intensity and being drained after the performances!”
Throughout Clairières dans le ciel the singer needs an unusual amount of vocal control, with some long notes to master. Katharine laughs, modestly. “That’s very true! It took a long time until I felt I was typically integrated with what she asks. The original singer who premiered it was a tenor, and that gives it a different sound of course, but it’s not easy for a tenor as it’s for a high voice that could be a soprano or tenor. There is an amazing story that I find very touching, which is that when she wrote the piece it was the beginning of World War One. Normal performances weren’t really happening in France, and she was busy with the cycle, doing her best in her first year after winning the Prix de Rome composition prize. She wrote this major piece and had to do a private ‘try out’ of the premiere, where she sang all 13 songs herself and Nadia played the piano. That was the only time she ever heard or experienced her own song cycle live, when she sang it. I thought about that so much because the songs are so challenging to sing, they’re really tough and ask a lot of you. Yet somehow Lili, not a professional singer or even a performer, managed to do it in a home for a few friends as an unofficial premiere. Something about that inspires all of us – professional or not – to try to meet the challenges of these amazing songs!”
The challenges are by no means restricted to the singer, with the pianist battling some quasi-orchestral writing to evoke a whole range of colours. Armstrong smiles. “Towards the end of the cycle it really opens out in scale, and suddenly all these changes and fragments, and the breaking apart of everything to represent what’s happening emotionally give it a bigger scale than the standard song repertoire. It’s emotionally very intense, and a lot of the transitions in the music are directly related to the psychology of the text. They are difficult to navigate and you really have to think about you do that. The counterpoint is not simple, either!”
To complement the Boulanger’s cycle there are two more of her songs and two piano pieces, along with works by Szymanowski and Bacewicz. As Polish composers, their language is a marked but welcome contrast to the French songs. “I’m so glad, if that’s how it feels to you”, says Katharine warmly. “That’s certainly how it felt to me in preparing it. Polish is a really tough language in which to sing. I had done a bit of Szymanowski in the past but not a lot, so it was a big hill to climb, but it also created different chapters in terms of my ability to assimilate the music. It really directly affects how you think about the score, the way the vocal line unfolds. Once you learn about the way sounds travel in Polish through the mouth – vowels and consonants – it’s very different from other languages, but it has the same kind of specificity as French. They both have to be really precise, the position in the mouth, the position of each of the parts of the mouth – the tongue, how the lips are shaped, what the space inside is like – all of these things are super specific, and I had great help with that. Once I began to get a handle on the Polish, not that I am singing it like a native speaker would, I began to understand the music better too. That allowed me to understand the emotional temperature of the songs as a result, so it really was an important part of the preparation. If it feels like differentiated sections on the programme then I’m very glad because that was something we were aiming for.”
The songs are an area of Szymanowski’s output that feel ‘off limits’ in recent times. “I find it so strange”, says Katharine, “as his piano and violin pieces are a lot better known, and his opera King Roger has been done in London not that long ago. It’s a stunning piece, and I think that’s how you got to know it?”, she says, turning to Sam. “Yes”, he confirms. “I’ve done the Myths for violin and piano but that really reignited my imagination for his sound world. It’s really special. “The songs are quite hard to programme though”, says Katharine. “I’ve known songs of Szymanowski for a long time, and I’ve really loved them – but I’ve sung one complete cycle of his which is the Songs of The Infatuated Muezzin, a particularly beautiful piece. Apart from that, I have never done a complete song cycle of his. When we were thinking about what to put on this disc, we loved the music and knew it would be a great pair with Boulanger, but then which cycle or chunks of songs to choose? We figured out that’s probably why we don’t hear the songs more often. Every cycle has a big challenge, a big thematic difficulty, not all of the songs are of equally high quality, or dramatically it doesn’t create the kind of story we look for in song cycles. So we decided what we would love to do is think about the developing theme of the program, which is how do we cope with things that vanish or things that disappear, and pick and choose with that?
Their approach paid dividends. “The whole world of Szymanowski opened up to us in a beautiful way and suddenly many things became possible that are not possible when thinking of his own groupings of songs. I would hope more people can start to think outside the box of just the groupings, the cycles, the opus numbers, because it’s such a rich and beautiful repertoire and you don’t have to think of it that way to make a nice programme.”
It is an easy trap to fall into with songs, thinking they should only be sung in the groups in which they were published. Is it the case of some composers randomly putting songs together but all of them being published at the same time? “That’s exactly it”, confirms Katharine, “and this is the funny thing about the song cycle, this term that we’ve come to associate with anything from 3 to 24, any number of songs. It meant different things at different times, and to different composers. There are some famous 19th century examples of pieces that were conceived complete, but for the most part they were mostly songs published at the same time for a commercial reason, which is that someone could take home a book of songs and get to know them. With Szymanowski he was such a prolific song composer, and some of the groups have a real cohesion and a reason for them being together. We found the songs don’t necessarily suffer if you sample them out of context and are stronger as a result than if you just try to stick to an opus number. For us it was an eye=-opening approach.”
The songs of Bacewicz were an unexpected find. “That was a real discovery. I found out that Bacewicz is a figure known in orchestral circles and in chamber music circles, because she was a violinist and wrote beautiful music for strings. A lot of string players and pianists I know had played her or a few of her pieces. Singers know nothing about her, because she didn’t write very much vocal music at all. She only has 11 songs, I think – a very small number. They were only recorded for the first time as a collection of her complete songs for voice and piano in the year before our recording, so it was luck that I was able to actually hear them.”
There is an intriguing historical context, too, meaning her music fits the collection hand in glove. “I had come across her name, and liked her string music once I started to listen to it, and I found this interesting biographical continuity, because Lili Boulanger and Szymanowski lived at the same time. They didn’t meet each other but they were inspired by many of the same things, writing music that was fearless, imaginative, colourful and with no ceiling on the kind of emotional intensity. There was something really common between them, but then we were hoping to find some sort of cooler composer in terms of the emotional temperature of the music, to mop up all that intensity but still be in the same world. We thought for a while about Lutoslawski, and there are some beautiful ones by him that are more known, but eventually I just bumped into Bacewicz, I came across her almost by accident. A friend mentioned the name of this composer and I said, “Wait, who’s that? That sounds Polish?” “Well, yes, she was Polish.” “Wait, she?! Who is this?!” So that that was how it began.”
Her fascination with the composer deepened. “Once I started looking into it, and found out that the songs had just been recorded, I thought they were fantastic. It turns out she was a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s, so there’s something a little bit different in her influence. She was the generation after Szymanowski, so would have known Szymanowski she was studying at Warsaw when he was the head of the Conservatory. There seemed to be a continuation of the family of music that was coming as a result of all Szymanowski’s innovations and from the Boulanger sisters, but by then she was really doing her own thing. I found it very interesting, very fresh, and the music very beautiful. Although it’s also intense, it does have a different way of interacting with the emotions of the texts, than Szymanowski or Boulanger.”
One poem, Parting by Rabindranath Tagore, appears on the album in contrasting settings by Szymanowski (in German) and Bacewicz (Polish). One wonders when they encountered it in their lives and how that affected them? “I find it so interesting”, says Katharine. “In that one poem that is on the album twice, although in different languages. Szymanowski’s approach is so melancholy and so hopeless, and Bacewicz has no fear in expressing anger. I’ve thought about the pressure on women, and women composers, and then women composers of songs, what kinds of pressure they have to create things that are just very beautiful. For a long time I think that’s what people expected women to produce – songs in a domestic form, rather than a big orchestral form met for the concert hall, things that were beautiful and pleasant to listen to. Bacewicz really broke all those moulds, writing music that is rhythmic and super spiky. That setting of that song I found it very cool that the setting was completely different than Szymanowski’s and was very angry. I really liked that about it.”
Armstrong’s approach to Bacewicz’s music was similarly fresh. “Her music was new to me. Interestingly I was teaching a class of students about the Piano Sonata no.2, which is quite beautiful, and has been played quite a lot in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately there is not much music for piano by Lili Boulanger, though two of her three pieces are on the album – and then with Szymanowski I did some of the chamber music actually. Szymanowski is more familiar to me by ear than stylistically, he is very specific but also quite accessible. With Boulanger the influences are obvious in a sense, certainly Wagner and Fauré I hear in there, but the voice is really her own, especially in the song cycle, where the forms are quite unconventional. It is a question of finding your way in and the prose, the essence of the language. As Katharine was saying, in Bacewicz it’s much more paired down and concentrated, in a way that I think is more expressionist than Szymanowski.”
Dain and Armstrong worked in each other’s company through lockdown, where their creative relationship was cemented – enough for them to have plans for further collaborations. “We always have far more ideas than we can ever implement or use!” laughs Katharine. “Coming up with interesting ideas and music that I love and want to explore further is never the challenge. With this project, because we’re not Covid-locked down anymore, we’ve spent as much time on this as we did on the previous disc, probably more. The question is that in the end it’s going to require a huge investment, so what is going to light such a fire under you that you’re willing to put in the amount of time that we want to? Not everybody approaches recording in the same way, but what’s been so rewarding for us has been giving ourselves as much time as we can until the answers arrive, and you can’t force them. The Boulanger cycle we started by performing live, and did one recital, and it blew our minds how amazing it was – but that only came by performing it. We realised in rehearsal that this is a major piece, more than we realised, but only in performance did it really hit us what an impact it can have. That was already more than two years ago, since when we’ve performed it as much as we could, and every time we do we have to go back and spend another few days or a week revisiting it, uncovering new things, and trying to set aside our old ways of coping with the score’s challenges in order to get to a truer version each time, a version that’s more honest. It’s really hard but it’s also the biggest pleasure of the work.”
Looking forward, “I have an idea – one at the top of my mind – and many others lining up behind that idea! We just have to see as we begin to try music together, and that’ll be the next step. We’re always doing that for fun, thinking about future recital programmes, whether they become recording products or not, and finding out what really makes us so passionate that we have to spend the time and we have to do all that discovery.”
Turning to live performance, Katharine has Finzi’s Dies natalis on her concert schedule in the Netherlands, where they both live. Is the piece a curiosity for Dutch audiences? “It’s my first time performing it, and it’s so amazing, but Finzi is really not very well represented here. I would say in general English language – American and British – is not performed so often. I really jumped at the chance when this opportunity came along. It was going to be a Christmas concert, and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra – a wonderful orchestra – had their programming already, but when they proposed this and I had to do it! I never get to do Finzi unless it’s on recital, and I choose it for fun with Vaughan Williams or English composers in the same period. Mostly it’s me having to advocate for them, so that was very exciting!”
Is their hope for the new album a similar aim, to bring in new listeners – as well as retaining those who enjoyed the first album? “Both of those are equally important to us”, she says, “and whether we’re thinking about people who are inside or outside of the experience of listening to art song albums already. There’s a very niche market for people who already know what they’re getting when they see this, even within people who like song. We’ve discovered that these are three composers that – although the combination might be intriguing – people really have no idea what they’re going to hear. There are several simultaneous goals. One is that for people who love song, but don’t know that there are good songs by these people, that they will listen and realise that the song repertoire is fantastic. The Boulanger is an overlooked masterpiece, and people don’t know that yet because it’s not heard very often. But then we felt equally passionately about Szymanowski and his songs. If you think you love hearing song recitals, but haven’t heard any of these composers represented on a song recital yet, you can listen on a recording at home and realise there’s really good stuff here. Let’s let’s try to get into performance!”
They have clearly considered their output, for Armstrong nods in agreement as Katharine talks. “In the end”, she says, “we also didn’t want to make something that only would be of cerebral specialist appeal. We hoped to make something that if you know nothing about any of this music at all, you could still listen from beginning to end if you chose, to feel an emotional shape and hear very beautiful songs in a very thoughtfully laid out sequence – the same way you would for anything else, like pop music. That’s why we spend all this time digging up music that people haven’t heard yet, because it turns out to be super emotionally powerful and direct and beautiful.”
She cites a recent event supporting their approach. “Last week we did a release concert for the album, and someone in the audience was a pop musician I know who had seen how passionate I was about this project, though this person had absolutely no experience listening to classical songs. They came to the show with an open mind, and they write pop albums, concept albums, single songs. At the end of the show, they loved it – and said “It’s the same as what I do, they’re songs! They each have a feeling, or series of feelings, and they go on a journey from start to end. There’s no difference in what we do except that the style is different!” To me that felt like such a happy validation, and the work that we do to build bridges. This is actually just music that you haven’t heard yet, but anyone can relate to. We feel equally strongly about these two goals for the album.”
The example adds fuel to the theory that Schubert was, in fact, one of the very first writers of the early pop song. “I completely agree!” says Katharine, “and I didn’t instantly like song when I heard it on recordings. When I was 19 years old and encountered Schubert I had no experience with it before. I liked pop songs and choir music, and that was how I got into singing, not through classical solo singing at all. When I first encountered it I found it strange and stylized, and a bit off putting, but when I heard it live and realised that it’s just about how someone is putting across a story in a different way, I found the music is really beautiful once you get a chance to experience that more easily.” How reassuring – to hear a singer’s own story behind an initial struggle to love song, for this is an area of classical music receiving less column inches than most. The next part of the process is for you, the reader, to get out there and start listening – for the same transformative experience can most definitely be yours.
Katharine Dain and Sam Armstrong present their new album Forget This Album on 7 Mountain Records. You can order the album at the 7 Mountain Records website, or listen below:
Arcana.fm 