Month: August 2021

MOONLIGHT REFLECTIONS

Stacey Alleaume and Amir Farid

Move Records MCD 613

Now here’s an unapologetic, old-fashioned CD with content suited to a recital from several decades ago – except for some unexpected American interpolations. Soprano Alleaume has succeeded – as far as anyone can these days – with the national company. I can’t recall seeing her in Melbourne Opera Australia productions – but then, in my last years down south, I got to see very few of them. Here she is partnered with the one of our most gifted piano accompanists who has been stranded in his Australian base town, thanks to the world scourge.

Both artists are concerned with some fine music, a track or four of worthy arcana, and a couple of absolute forgettables. Their presentation lasts a little over 52 minutes in all, the longest track a Victor Hugo setting, the shortest an excerpt from Browning’s Pippa passes, both composed by Amy Beach. Some writers feature a few times – two songs each by Puccini, Massenet and Reynaldo Hahn; three from Respighi, with single submissions by Chaminade, Duparc, Frank Bridge, Pietro Cimara and Saint-Saens. Beach has four samples, the CD ending with her Three Browning Songs Op. 44.

Alleaume sings 18 songs – eight French, six Italian, and four English – which is versatile enough, especially if the intention is to hone in on a particular period. This collection’s earliest sample comes from c.1865 in Saint-Saens’ Clair de lune, while the latest is Reynaldo Hahn’s most popular product, A Chloris, dating from 1916. Most of the material was composed between 1888 and 1913 – 15 tracks in total – while the odd man out that misses these parameters (besides the two extremes) is one of the most famous art songs in the repertoire: Duparc’s 1870 L’invitation au voyage.

In a way stressing the basic difference in art-song potentialities, Alleaume and Farid begin with Chaminade’s L’ete, which is succeeded by the Duparc gem. The first is a show-piece, trimmed with decorative short roulades between a swift-moving melody while the piano curvets in support. It’s superficial, showy stuff and the soprano reaches every note with no indication of stress; perhaps the accompaniment might have been crisper but there also you can hear no flaws. With the Baudelaire setting, it seemed to me that both artists were intent on underlining the last word of each stanza because the approach impressed as slow-paced and indulgent. The chanson was devoid of forward motion; any invitation to travel to the Land of Heart’s Desire lacked direction apart from towards the bed and the piano’s restless accompaniment was slowed down to a sensual fluttering. To my mind, the second stanza’s canals were being viewed from indoors, rather than on a vessel bound for Cythera.

Bridge’s setting of Landor’s O that it were so! has a congenial sentiment underpinning its lyrical flow, excellently managed by both artists as they rise to the central climax and soothingly return to the calm of this song’s opening. There’s a worrying moment as both recover from the rallentando after ‘blest’, but the soprano shows her sense of taste by taking the lower alternative in the 6th last bar. Both Puccini songs enjoy sensitive treatment, the phrasing careful and almost all the sung notes ideally centred. Terra e mare holds indicators of the composer’s confidence in setting heavily Romantic lines while Sole e amore is a familiar friend, having provided material for the La Boheme Act 3 quartet when Mimi sings Addio, dolce svegliare. The oddest thing about this piece is the composer’s inclusion of the dedication (?) to be sung in the last bars, as well as the pretty trite lines, possibly by Puccini, that don’t fit with the music, once you remember their use in the opera for an unforgettable scene.

What do you learn from Amy Beach’s setting of Vicor Hugo’s Chanson d’amour? The American writer had a fine ear for the genre, certainly, best demonstrated in the three choruses of this work, throughout which cellist Zoe Knighton joins her long-time collaborator Farid in weaving some lush lines around Alleaume’s far-ranging part. It’s a persuasive piece, particularly for the care that Beach gave to the supporting material and her differentiations between the verses and choruses. Having said that, you won’t find much here that’s harmonically or melodically original but it slots into the then-contemporary French scene quite easily.

Pietro Cimara’s Stornello is an elegant urbanization of a rustic format wherein funsters capped each other’s lines to entertaining effect in accommodating bars/hotels. This one is a love song of some individuality in its verses by Arnaldo Frateili and a lean eloquence in the music which doesn’t range too far; a quiet, melancholy looking back to the first flush of rapturous love and presenting our performers with absolutely no challenges.

Both Hahn songs – L’enamouree and A Chloris – show restraint, probably a tad too much in the latter where a singer can achieve much with careful dynamic shadings and a disciplined employment of vibrato. But both musicians do the composer excellent service, illustrating an emotional insight that you wouldn’t anticipate from a writer who has been denigrated and minimzed for many years. Even the dropping sequences in the vocal part of the first song don’t irritate as much in performance as they do on paper, and Farid is impressively calm with the attention-grabbing accompaniment, complete with Bach-indebted ground bass, to Hahn’s most celebrated chanson.

In the three Respighi songs, Alleaume runs a cleverly contrived gamut of mainly mild emotions while Farid has plenty with which to make accompanists’ hay. Notte sets up a tautly drawn scene where a garden’s nocturnal placidity masks a world of possible despair; both musicians give the work plenty of breathing space, with an excellent transformation at the half-way point where the bass and alto line triplets rise to the surface while both voice and piano left-hand revisit the opening stanza. Nebbie remains constantly menacing and tragic from the start, a fine scena with lots of dramatic vocal material. Farid gave the impression of holding nothing back in an accompaniment that almost continually reinforces the vocal line with massive minim chords. And Contrasto offers a gently rolling allegretto accompaniment to an amiable if completely forgettable vocal contribution, the text offering an elementary premonition of Pierrot Lunaire with the moon weeping while lovers ignore its suffering; a placid piece that seems to present one side and, not living up to its title, omits the other.

It’s hard to fight against the self-centred rhapsody of Hugo’s Etre aime, as the author is so confident in his statements, emotionally flimsy though they may be. Massenet manages to smooth them out into something almost palatable and Alleaume sustains a nice oscillation between restraint and hothouse ecstasy in her account. The composer’s Amoureuse is a different kettle of semi-erotic fish in its somewhat stately apostrophes to the discontented lover, and the vocal and histrionic range is larger. Both performers do very well in maintaining a forward movement, eschewing the temptation to linger over-much in those scrappy bars treating the ante- and penultimate lines of each stanza. But then, this is not a poetry or a music with which I find much sympathy, perhaps because it impresses as being superficial and displaying a Proustian-corkwood insulation of address.

Saint-Saens has no other vocal portal in my experience beyond Samson et Dalila and his Clair de lune comes as an unexpected oddity, chiefly because his setting of Catulle Mendes’ poem is metrically challenging for its interpreters, notably at the start where the melodic line emphasizes a few unimportant syllables. Farid makes agreable work of the asymmetric piano part but the piece is vocally unremarkable and Alleaume is untested to any noticeable degree.

Beach’s settings of Browning begin with The year’s at the spring, and it reflects the optimism of the young girl as she sets out on her walk. The tone is moderately jubilant, necessarily so as it leads to that famous, life-affirming concluding couplet. You couldn’t call it volatile, but the atmosphere is not far from it and Beach was careful to avoid monotony of metre by stretching lines that she considered focal, as well as indulging in textual repetitions and displacements. Much the same happens in Ah, love, but a day where the repetitions seem more pronouncedly self-indulgent, even if this track ranks among the best on the CD. It also reveals an unexpected visitor in violinist Erica Kennedy who spends some of her time following Farid’s top line – but not slavishly so as she enjoys some passages of individual action. Which makes you wonder whether or not this obbligato is kosher; I can’t find it in any edition of these songs. Still, the piece holds a moving transition from F minor to F Major in the plaintive last 13 bars.

A more consistent achievement comes in the final I send my heart up to thee, the opening seven lines from the verse-dialogue In a Gondola. Here, the male lover’s ardour is expressed in a carefully shaped series of phrases that Alleaume treats with fine craft, using the ossia top note when offered except in the last bars where taking the pitch up an octave would be unnecessary to the lyric’s shape. Again, the composer offers variety for her singer inside the 9/8 time-signature with some lines stretched while others follow a predictable pattern.

Here’s an opportunity to experience Alleaume’s abilities in an unexpected field. She has appeared in several Opera Australia productions over the last six years and it looks as though her career is set to follow that trajectory. This collection of songs reveals an interpretative ability of some accomplishment, the soprano’s laudable efforts reinforced by one of our most insightful accompanists.

ELEPHANTASY

Eve Duncan

Move Records MD 3454

Eve Duncan has been a strong force in Australian Music for many years; not just as a composer but also as a teacher and administrator. By this last term, I don’t mean a career-conscious functionary snuffling out a life in some university departmental office, but as a servitor of this country’s composers, principally as founder of the Melbourne Composers League and as a participant in enterprises like the Asian Composers League and director of Federation Music Week when we all decided in 2001 to celebrate a century since the legislated and constitutional combining of states. And we can all see these days how well that turned out.

On this CD, Duncan is chiefly represented by two major works: her 2012 piano concerto in two movements called Sydney Opera House, and excerpts from her opera The Aspern Papers, with a libretto by David Malouf extracted from the Henry James novella. This latter is one of the many products of the American writer’s fertile and prolix imagination with which I am totally unfamiliar. Like all opera-lovers, I know The Turn of the Screw, once upon a time even going back to read the original as a method of assessing Myfanwy Piper‘s skill in transforming the original into something simpler for the composer. Again, like all opera-lovers, I don’t know anything of Britten’s other James incursion, Owen Wingrave, which was also arranged for Aldeburgh consumption by Piper.

Apart from these well-known James-indebted operas, I’m completely ignorant about Douglas Moore‘s The Wings of the Dove 1961 adaptation, Thea Musgrave‘s 1974 The Voice of Ariadne (rising from the bones of The Last of the Valerii), Thomas Pasatieri‘s Washington Square of 1976, and two other treatments of The Aspern Papers by Dominick Argento in 1987 and Philip Hagemann in 1988. I once heard Donald Hollier‘s version of Washington Square – The Heiress – in its premiere performance by ChamberMade at The Church Theatre in Hawthorn, some time in November 1988; not a rack remains behind. And, in another life, I’ve taught The Europeans but it remains as vague in the memory as an ill-advised assault on The Golden Bowl.

This CD opens with Approaching Venice, which is the prelude to Duncan’s opera. Later, we are treated to a duet – I told you, Mr. Vayne, nothing here is mine; a soprano aria, Do you think I am beautiful?; another couple of duets – Ah, but I do know his face, and Juliana and Jeffrey’s Love Duet; to end, a pair of trios – So this is the dragon’s den, and If you were a relation. These extracts take a little over half the CD’s running time, with a bit of space left for some short instrumental solos: Deep in Summer for trumpet and piano, From a Star Afar for piano solo, and Aer Turas for flute, clarinet and cello.

Adding to the complexity of these several tracks, Duncan has found inspiration and/or structure for many of them in architecture – Utzon’s bastardized masterpiece for the concerto, Palladio and the Venetian environment (somehow) for the operatic fragments. As well, the aria is internally referencing Korean court music on the underlying principle that Venice traded with the Far East. Does any of this help to clarify what we hear? I’ve tried to find connections but don’t have the requisite responsiveness or nimbleness of intellect, not even finding reminiscences of the city’s alleys in the singers’ intertwining lines. Still, over the past five decades I’ve spent only a few days during three visits in penetrating the city’s labyrinthine back-blocks, frequently getting lost, and so am under-prepared for Duncan’s compositional grids.

As an introduction to her opera, Duncan presents an optimistic and healthy view of the city; rather at odds with the unpleasant plot of the novella which involves greed, theft and monomania. The mobility of the cityscape is evident with plenty of rustling strings and brief tuckets, swift trombone glissandi, with some unsettling timpani as a tidal underpinning. Throughout, the emphasis is on action, or at least an active scenario is anticipated even before the curtain rises. Cymbal crashes add to the aura of sparkling light and, despite its sometimes grinding harmonic clusters, the overture’s conclusion is set in a bright brass-dominated major. No adagietto here as your boat crawls up the lagoon but a brightly coloured atmosphere, performed by the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Josefino Chino Toledo – and how that came about, I’ve no idea.

Next come the two parts of Duncan’s piano concerto with Michael Kieran Harvey investing his brilliance in its solo part. He is supported by an unspecified chamber orchestra conducted by ‘Timothy Philips’, who I assume is Timothy Phillips, director of the Arcko Symphonic Ensemble. In any case, the work was recorded by the ABC in the Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2016 – as were the six vocal excerpts from The Aspern Papers and the trumpet-piano duet.

Duncan begins her score with a semi-cadenza for piano which sets up another rustling soundscape with occasional interpolations from others – percussion, single brass and woodwind, a band of strings. The aim is to focus on Utzon: in Movement 1, he focus is directed to his influences and background as well as what can only be styled as his construction’s topography which the composer has used as a kind of palimpsest. You can pick out motifs and gestures, especially as the orchestral contribution expands, but the work’s impetus is left in the pianist’s hands. To be honest, the score tends to fade into effort when the keyboard is silent – which is fortunately rare. Harvey is quite at home with his peripatetic role, sounding more comfortable than the supporting ensemble, despite some startlingly lucid and confident contributions from clarinet and percussion.

Movement 2 opens with more collegiality as Duncan weaves her orchestra-based scintillations, suggestive of the Opera House site and surrounds. In what follows, the Utzon/piano figure is well-integrated with the other musicians and the texture takes on an Ivesian style of agglomeration before Harvey re-asserts his dominance momentarily at the half-way point. Apparently, this part of the concerto treats the architect’s interior world, the realization of his project being brought up short against the realities of New South Wales politics of the time: an apotheosis of philistinism. Utzon can be discerned putting his head above the parapet but is all too often swamped by the orchestral fabric and some wearing outbursts.

The score would doubtless yield more treasures than those discovered in the few hearings I’ve given it but staying on Duncan’s compositional continuum is very difficult. You can find many reflections of your own attitudes to both Utzon and the Opera House, although it’s more than probable that where I find suggestions of the relentless criticism – by troglodytes from both major political parties – that dogged the architect’s last years on the project, others will hear more benign forces at work, reflecting the industry involved in its protracted construction and the brilliant juxtaposition of the building, harbour and city in what has become a splendid national cliche over its 48-year history.

Harvey appears on the following duo track, with Tristram Williams playing trumpet. This work moves with an energy that relaxes only in its final bars, both instruments handling a limited number of motives to happy effect. As far as the work’s language goes, Duncan walks a kind of middle road between complexity and sophisticated simplicity where even the dissonances aim to strike few sparks and suggestions of tonal underpinning loom large. As anticipated, Harvey performs the solo From a Star Afar with admirable sympathy, the underlying vision here being of observing Earth from outside itself. No tricks as the piece winds its way along with a kind of calm determination – but it’s over very quickly, coming in at under 90 seconds.

The first of the opera extracts is sung by soprano Justine Anderson as Miss Tita and baritone Jerzy Kozlowski taking the role of Henry Vayne, the work’s fulcrum and a shady negotiator who is attempting to acquire memorabilia left by the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern. In the original, this character has no name but opera tends to collapse if anonymity is the go. The two singers engage in a dialogue where each is feeling his/her way into a relationship; it’s all very civilised and artificial with the chamber orchestra giving an appropriate pattering support. The vocal articulation is agreably clear and accurate but few demands are made on anybody. Still, it’s early days.

Soprano Deborah Kayser has the role of Juliana Bordereau, lover of the poet and now a century old vendor in need of money. She mocks Vayne by asking him if he finds her beautiful and sings of her past with something approaching rhapsody, although Kayser has to cope with some tough competition, including a persistent trumpet. Still, you can hear the shaping of a real character, a distant relation to Miss Havisham; the only problems come in Kayser’s breathing as she copes with an angular line.

In the next duet, the old woman shows Vayne a portrait of Aspern, painted by her father, which she might be prepared to sell if the price is right. Even while making the offer, she knows her visitor can’t afford it and appears to take some malefic delight in this realization. Again, Kayser is occasionally menaced by a heavy accompaniment but my main interest is wondering how this scene would be carried off, especially in its later pages where the orchestral contribution is intended (I believe) to be a commentary on the two characters’ mental/emotional states. Next comes a duet of sorts for Juliana and the shade of Aspern, sung by countertenor Dan Walker; well, he’s chronicled as owning that voice type but his sound here was really your normal tenor. The text consisted of both artists singing the other’s name, once more over a turbulent orchestral force. Well, the old lady is dying and Aspern is a ghost; nevertheless, the results are unconvincing; as they say on The Bachelor: what you can’t hear, you can’t feel.

Vayne and Miss Tita search Juliana’s room for Aspern’s letters, but the old lady wakes up from her delirium and denounces Vayne as she dies. Much of this is comprehensible and becomes a real duet while Kayser is confined to forcing out some low-pitched fulminations at the scene’s end. But Duncan does present her characters with skill here; when they sing, they have definite personalities, no matter how distorted or unpleasant they may be. As the crisis approaches, the instrumental forces take over with insistent energy. Oddly enough, the track ends on a tierce – possibly because Vayne has fled the scene.

Finally, Miss Tita asks Vayne to marry her; then he can have the papers in good conscience. He turns over the proposition but is too slow in responding and the deal falls through, whereupon she burns the papers. In a final trio, Juliana revives to carol with the two non-lovers in a calmly flowing retrospective, I suppose; the words are hard to make out, although the final word is a communal Respiro statement – patently not true for one character. I’m assuming this is the opera’s last scene; if so, matters wind down swiftly in a soft lyrical glow.

As far as I can detect, this ABC recording of the six extracts from The Aspern Papers – from October 26, 2016 – is the only time even parts of the opera have been performed in this country. The Australian Music Centre site suggests that a performance took place in Manila a year previously, but that occasion in all probability featured only the overture, Track 1 on this CD. Will we be likely to hear a complete performance at any time soon? Probably not, particularly considering the parlous state of contemporary Australian music in 2021, let alone the fits and starts that beset the larger, tradition-minded companies. A pity, because Duncan’s work has its advantages: its language easily assimilable, its characterization lucid, demands on vocalists and instrumentalists (a chamber group here, conducted by Phillips) falling well inside the competence of professionals.

Finally comes Aer Turas, which translates from the Gaelic as ‘air journey’. This is a reminiscence of travel to four sites: the monasteries of Leh, Tibet; North America’s Appalachians, particularly Mount Washington; the MacDonnell Ranges that lie in the southern reaches of the Northern Territory; and Wollemi National Park stretching from the Blue Mountains to the Hunter. Our participating trio – flute Lisa Breckenridge, clarinet Ian Sykes, cello Claire Kahn – travel with effortless collegiality through this piece which, I think, treats each of the specified destinations in turn; doing so with a deft alternation between curlicuing solos and disciplined ensemble writing.

In essence, this all represents a mini-retrospective of Duncan’s activity, bridging from 2012 (the Sydney Opera House concerto) to 2018 (Aer Turas and From a Star Afar). But its temporally cramped recording conditions – everything taped on the same day, apart from Approaching Venice, the piano solo and that final instrumental trio – indicate how difficult it is for a serious composer to be heard. Of course, the results here are blemished but that’s the cost of getting one chance at performing. However, this CD is commended to those who have sympathy with Australian composition, especially of a type that follows an approachable middle ground and avoids attention-seeking novelty for its own sake.