Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Monday, November 07, 2005

A Couple of Crowd Pleasers ...

The Five Senses
Stephen Paulus
Text: Joan Vail Thorne
Narrator: Janet Bookspan
Conductor: Gil Rose
Boston Modern Orchestra Project
Arsis

Yizkor Requiem – A Quest for Spiritual Roots
Thomas Beveridge
Sir Neville Marriner
Ana Marie Martinez, soprano
Elizabeth Shammash, mezzo-soprano
Robert Brubaker, tenor
Academy and Chorus of St. Martin in the Fields
Label: Naxos 8.559453

Admit it: You giggled when someone who certainly was no James Earl Jones whined out “Peter and the Wolf” or Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” with your local community orchestra. Even worse was suffering through the uppity soprano who mangled “Pierrot Lunaire” while you were in music school. And don’t even get me started on the past-Weillian spoken chorus work in Blitzstein’s “Regina”.

Face it, accompanied narration is hokey. And Sprechstimme, when done correctly, can be a transcendent experience, but in the wrong hands it will freely do the bidding of the forces of evil.

So, when I leafed through the liner notes of the new Stephen Paulus album, “The Five Senses – Windows of the Mind,” and realized that I was in for a half an hour of such orchestrated commentary, I did my best to approach the recording with open mind and ear. What I emerged with was an enjoyably light, if not ephemeral, experience with a piece that is most certainly a crowd pleaser when performed live.

Written for narrator Janet Bookspan (noted for a number of spoken word recordings and appearances as Commentator on PBS’s Live from Lincoln Center), “The Five Senses – Windows of the Mind” sets an expansive cycle of 14 poems by Joan Vail Thorn (librettist, playwright, and frequent Paulus collaborator), to a rich score steeped in the American idiom. Exploring, as the title suggests, the five – and possibly six – senses, these pieces range from fairy tale to pontification, from mock-Elizabethan love poem to stream of consciousness meandering.

All the individual elements of this recording, examined for their own merits, are pretty, entertaining, and unremarkable. Ms. Bookspan has a warm inviting voice that brings to mind a gentle teacher imparting knowledge to a circle of rapt grammar-schoolers. Her graceful, deep tenor, layered against the masterful and clean accompaniment of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under the baton of Gil Rose, carries us through the work, enlightening us when the text does not engage, and lulling us when the music wanders.

Ms. Vail Thorne’s poems are worthy encapsulations of the senses and their respective organs, effectively taking us on a journey through the body on both a symbolic and representative level.

Mr. Paulus’ music, if not a safe and literal interpretation of the text, positively shimmers in its orchestration, utilizing orchestral color in its full romantic capability.

Where “The Five Senses – Windows of the Mind” falls apart is in the marriage of these separate elements, the failing of which creates an overly dramatic half an hour that demands it is of a fuller substance than the established framework of the piece will allow. For example, on the page, “But I cannot taste / until I take things in / … way in … / into my mouth / … my tabernacle,” is a perfectly fair metaphor for the sensuousness of eating, but luridly spoken again Paulus’ intense score makes for a histrionically affected moment to which I can not help but roll my eyes, even after multiple listenings.

As well, while I understand that this piece was created specifically for Ms. Bookspan’s wonderful speaking voice, I am let to wonder, should Mr. Paulus have chosen to compose the music as literally as he has, why did he not just make it a song cycle? My preference for such a spoken word experiment would have been to let the composition take a back seat to the text, allowing the music to float behind the narration, to work against it, to collide with it, and ultimately to allow the audience to question the text and find deeper levels of meaning within it rather than having the orchestra interpret it for us.

Closing out the recoding is Paulus’ twenty-five minute set of orchestral studies, “The Age of American Passions,” again presented by Mr. Rose and the BMOP. In these three charming sketches program pieces, Paulus allows his musical whimsy to wander, taking us on a compelling journey through the American psyche. While, content wise, “The Age of American Passions” follows in the Americana tradition of Copland and Barber, this set of pieces again prove Paulus to be a masterful orchestrator of a more historical tradition. While not necessarily a reason to run out and purchase this disc, I doubt there are few other living composers who can match Paulus’ instincts regarding the emotional impact of orchestral color. This enchanting collection has made it into my current listening rotation and is providing me with a fitting soundtrack to my daily commute on the Chicago El.

*

That Naxos would issue a second recording of “Yizkor Requiem – A Quest for Spiritual Roots”, this time five years later as a Milken Archive of American Jewish Music project under the direction of Sir Neville Marriner, is proof of the crowd-pleasing ability of Beveridge’s 1994 composition. This new recording presents a cleaner studio capture of the piece, but lacking much of the fire contained in the original live recording (Naxos 8.559074).

A favorite of the choral music set, Beveridge originally conceived of “Yizkor Requiem” in 1991 upon the death of his father. Combining elements of the Requiem mass, the Jewish Yizkor service (meaning “May God remember”), creating a treatise on the parallels between Judaism and Christianity. Rather than using existing music, Beveridge has effectively composed in a style that strives to create a marriage between the religions’ rich musical traditions.

Under Marriner’s experienced baton, the recording is faithful and exact. There are moments of moving singing from soprano Ana Marie Martinez and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Shammash, as well as from the choral forces, but the performance suffers from the forced cantoring of tenor Robert Brubaker, leaving my vocal chords sore in sympathy.

All of the elements are here for a popular populist composition with relative staying power (accessibility, tonality, universality, ease-of-performance), but I want to like it much more than I do. There is little here to challenge me as a listener. Those sections that are soft and chant-like don’t contain the emotional lift or engaging texture that would propel me forward, and moments that should be full of great emotional intensity feel unsupported and cliché. Beveridge also refuses to allow the work to speak for itself, adding a spoken prayer meant to summarize the work to the end of the piece, but which ends up feeling like a tacked on and unnecessary apology. Ultimately, I could see “Yizkor Requiem” as the Easter cantata of many a progressively thinking church choir, or the centerpiece of collegiate and high school choral festivals, most certainly to the delight of those congregated.

If interested in the work of Beveridge, this is a very well engineered record of his popular cantata, but for a more compelling account of the work, I suggest sticking to the original recording.

posted by Eric C. Reda 5:52 PM