HOMEGROWN
Rebecca Cassidy and Alex Raineri
Move Records MCD 664
That’s just what they are: art songs by nine Australian composers, one of whom gets a double dip (Lisa Cheney) and another also represented by a piano solo, performed with enthusiastic rhapsody by Alex Raineri. His associate, soprano Rebecca Cassidy, moves through a pretty wide spectrum, even if the greater number of these writers share a brand of lyrical vocabulary that doesn’t move much beyond Debussy at its most sophisticated and Vaughan Williams at its simplest. Alright, let’s say Cyril Scott or John Ireland or possibly Duparc – well-trodden paths, whatever the derivation.
The earliest piece on this Move Records CD is a John Fletcher setting by Peggy Glanville-Hicks that dates from 1931. Next is Miriam Hyde’s 1933 Dream Land to a Christina Rossetti poem, with her piano solo – Brownhill Creek in Spring, dating from 1942. Then comes Dulcie Holland whose Hope in Spring from 1953 is here receiving its first recorded performance. For some reason, there’s a near-forty year break before we come to Betty Beath who, in 1991, wrote her River songs cycle, from which we hear River – Mother, River – Child. A year later, Mary Mageau produced Son of Mine to a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which is also enjoying its first recording here. Finishing the 20th century is Linda Kouvaras with Distant lullaby from her 1999 cycle Art and Life.
The first Cheney song comes from 2006, a simple Lullaby in its first recording, as are the rest of this CD’s contents. Melody Eotvos features here with one of her Wakeford Songs of 2014; By Train. Penultimately, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon appears with a 2022 commission written for Raineri’s Brisbane Festival: Crepe Myrtle Sky. The finish comes through Cheney’s second contribution, the most substantial on the disc: Gratitude and Grief, written last year and a substantial contribution to the form, even if the vocabulary applied is conservative.
Does that matter? Should we regard the similarities between Glanville-Hicks’ quick lyric and Cheney’s maternal eulogy as evidence of an inner consistency of language and employment of the form? Not as close as nearly100 years apart, I would think. You might find explanations for Glanville-Hicks, Hyde and Holland but the other six writers are working well after a massive explosion of technical and emotional language became available to Australian writers for several decades before, for example, Beath’s product of 1991. Such a discarding of advances in language speak to an undercurrent in the CD’s title where the writers use a compositional vocabulary that was tried and true, well established before most of them were born and which they are obviously happy to re-employ in these latter days of a current reductio ad absurdum in serious composition (see Eurovision or the ABC’s rage for relentless instances).
Cassidy and Raineri give a genteel reading of Glanville-Hicks’ setting of Fletcher’s two-stanza lyric which taxes nobody because of its clarity – one might say, its simplicity. The composer begins in G Major and stays in that key throughout with not a single extra accidental employed. The little prelude provides the initial material for the singer and the postlude reflects the piece’s beginning. Glanville-Hicks wrote it before leaving for England and it shows an 18-year-old making the most of what she has come across by way of instruction in 1930s Australia.
Showing a more adventurous attitude to tonality, Miriam Hyde’s treatment of Rossetti’s four stanzas shows an awareness of chromatic passing notes on its lush Brahmsian A Major path and the composer treats the vocal line as a continuous sheet rather than four repetitions while Raineri arpeggiates and moons soulfully with semitonal droops across the canvas. But I can’t help thinking of Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Pale Hands I Loved of 30 years earlier because of a similar hot-house emotional restraint and a similar vocal curvature, although Hyde’s choice of text makes for a refreshing dash of introspective brilliance.
As for Hyde’s piano piece, this also luxuriates in its A Major neo-Impressionism with some Debussy Arabesque-style arpeggios to begin over a left-hand melody that employs a flattened leading note, leading to a development/elongation of the set material, before a less active section – less full of Jardins sous la pluie or Jeux d’eau – moving more slowly, before a return to water imagery and a quiet coda. The images here are European; probably understandable because the photos I’ve come across of Brownhill Creek are of a lush landscape, even more so than the Esmond George watercolour that inspired it. Raineri has had this music in his repertoire for a few years now and holds its quivering sensibility in the palms of both hands.
With Holland’s love song (to her own text), we have a further reach back into the past, to an almost Victorian mode of communication. Also couched in A Major, its three verses operating in an A-B-A ternary mode, this is a fluent example of limited rhapsody, its emotional language operating inside strict bounds, the excitement limited to a concluding sustained vocal A, the whole typical of this popular writer’s craft in action. Cassidy and Raineri make an elegantly-paired combination in facing its few challenges.
Now we make the forty-year leap to the 1990s and Beath’s setting of a Jena Woodhouse poem which also could be using A Major as its base but is written in neutral tonalities with a kind of prevailing ambiguity, possibly arising from the composer’s time in Bali and Java. Still, there are passages where Europe still holds sway, e.g. bars 15 to 18, and bars 24 to 26; in fact, anywhere that the texture changes from the open-sounding 6/8 quavers set up at the opening. But it manages to avoid the predictable character of this CD’s earlier samples through its angularity and rhythmically varied vocal and piano lines.
Setting this country’s best-known Aboriginal poet is a daunting task, even for an American expatriate. Mageau achieves a good deal in her Noonuccal setting, keeping up a steady A octave bass drone-support for most of the three stanzas, with some grinding dissonances in the pivotal chords underpinning the central quatrain. Despite the poet’s attempts to lift the spirits of reconcilers in her final lines, Mageau maintains the accompaniment’s grimness under the composer’s arioso-type vocal line. The whole exercise reminds me of Schubert’s Leiermann, probably because of that persistent bass and its added notes like Schubert’s use of the appoggiatura.
Both poet and composer change the tone for the work’s central lines which detail some of the crimes committed against Aboriginal people, causing Mageau to break into a confronting discordant piano part that heightens the outrage being communicated, the harmony having moved to C minor, if you take the soaring vocal line into consideration. It makes for grim hearing, but then, the poet was intent on holding her mirror up to white failures – which I think come across strongly in this musical realization.
Distant lullaby is the concluding song in Kouvaras’ six-part cycle and is emphatically tonal from start to finish; I believe it starts and ends in C Major with some moves into the flattened submediant – two of them – that would recall Schubert if the general texture and message of the piece weren’t plain. Art and Life traces a woman’s infatuation with an artist, the baby they have, a growing disaffection, her militancy in the face of abuse, her action (murder?) in facing down the violence against her, and this lullaby sung from her incarceration.
Kouvaras is an academic at Melbourne University but her composition practice comes from a different source than the sophisticated technical bravura prevalent in her workspace. You might find it effective in achieving its end, showing a pretty widespread emotion – love of a child – in a simple consolatory expression but, for me, it’s naïve. Yes, I know that’s the nature of a lullaby but this simplicity sounds inconsistent with our times – too much Richard Strauss, not enough Janacek.
Furthering the trend towards simpler times of yore, Lisa Cheney’s Lullaby stays in a 3/4 metre throughout, I think. Certainly, the key is B flat minor and there are few deviations from it. There’s a lilt and folk-song gentleness about this piece which eventually reduces Raineri’s function (in the third stanza?) to little more than a few supporting notes or chords. Probably the only surprise comes in the presence of a flattened supertonic at the end of a stanza or two; for the rest, the New Simplicity strikes again.
Suddenly, we come to a composition that sounds totally contemporary in Eotvos’ striking lyric which details World War One nurse Muriel Wakeford’s arrival in Cairo prior to heading for Gallipoli (which she survived). By Train is part of a five-song cycle on texts extracted from Wakeford’s diary but the other songs are difficult to come by. Anyway, this composer has a complex vocabulary and puts both her interpreters to the test, particularly Raineri with flurries of notes meant to represent the train itself. Still, the vocal line is in parts jagged, with difficult leaps and it’s rhythmically demanding as the piece operates in a free-flowing ambience. Nevertheless, despite the high chromaticism at work, I sensed an undercurrent of G minor beneath the abrupt forays and excursions from both musicians.
We hit show-tune territory with the Cheetham Fraillon creation. The song’s text – as with Holland, Hyde and one of the Cheneys – was written by the composer and can’t be found online. Neither can you find access to any part of the music, although that doesn’t matter so much because the proportions and content are easy to fathom, often to the point of being predictable. The song appears to begin in an ambiguous C Major (most of the Bs are natural) but ends in a definite F Major. It only strays from these possibilities twice, the second deviation more solid, but you are confronted by a pleasant vocal line that could have found a place in a Sondheim musical.
And so to Gratitude and Grief which is a mixture of scena and meditation with motherhood as its subject. This song is the only one to enjoy any sort of exegesis in the CD’s accompanying leaflet and it’s a backgrounding from the composer on her embrace of the existence of her two young daughters. The text comes from New Zealand poet Jessica Urlichs and, although it does nothing for me because of an innate sexism and misogyny typical in men of my age, the words find a gifted setter in Cheney and evoke a lucid response from these musicians.
The piece rises and falls like a long arc, climaxing in the words ‘I’m still learning to breathe under this waterfall of gratitude and grief’ which are sung with conviction by Cassidy while Raineri evokes an emotional cascade in a fierce wash of notes. On either side is a calm that eventually resolves into a limpid vision of the new-born as infinite but knowable, which is about as consoling a realization as any parent can come to and which mercifully doesn’t tip over into self-congratulation.
Here also, there are traces of the show-tune sentiment in the melodic phrases and that peculiarly American mode of confessional declamation that has its origins in Rodgers and Hammerstein heroines. But Cheney isn’t alone in this penchant for the soulful and accessible, offering the most sustained instance in this CD of a contentment with trusted tropes.
I assure you that the order in which I’ve commented on the4se songs is not that of the CD’s tracks, which jumps all over the shop temporally. For some of us, the album is light-on, coming in under 45 minutes; balance that with exposure to two fine talents who invest their talents and sympathy into each composer that they benefit here with their art.
O'Connell the Music 