Volume 21 Issue 1 - September 2015

hanging in a basket suspended high in the air.
Janos Gardonyi
Adrianne Pieczonka sings Strauss; Wagner
Adrianne Pieczonka; Brian Zeger
Delos DE 3474
!!
The songs by
Richard Strauss, some
of the most beloved
solo vocal compositions
in the repertoire
(next to Mahler’s),
come with an
almost-insurmountable
caveat: They
have been recorded sublimely by Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore on piano.
Those reference recordings are still capable
of defeating any artist and Pieczonka must
acknowledge their supremacy. So rather
than dwell on comparisons, let’s judge this
recording on its own merits.
First things first, Pieczonka is one of the
best Wagnerian singers of our era. She proves
that with Wesendonck-Lieder, a poetic
account of Wagner’s infidelity to his wife
Minna. As for the rest of the album, there are
two forces conspiring against Pieczonka’s
rendition of Strauss: the awkward, excessively
close miking by Anton Kwiatkowski
in the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio; and the
hesitant, almost withdrawn piano playing
of Brian Zeger. As if refusing to be an equal
partner, Zeger hides behind and blends
with Pieczonka’s voice. This voice, opulent
and beautiful, works best when coaxed and
engaged by an equal partner, be it orchestra
or piano solo. Here it sounds unusually shy
and reluctant. That is too bad, because we
now deserve a new reference recording and
Pieczonka definitely has the talent to create
such a disc.
Robert Tomas
Aria – Nicholas Isherwood performs John
Cage
Nicholas Isherwood
BIS BIS-2149
!!
To say that for
many music lovers the
music of John Cage is
an acquired taste is to
gloss over the intellectual
charge contained
within it. Cage was a
fearless experimenter
and many of his compositions were more of a
“project” than a piece of music. Take the title
piece Aria, augmented with bizarre tape snippets
(Fontana Mix), as restored in 2009 by
Gianluca Verlingieri. The sheer audacity of
the piece, given it was created in 1958, “for a
voice in any range” is enough to give us pause.
This album takes us through 43 years of music
and includes Cage’s settings from Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake.
It may come as a surprise, given his
post-modern inclinations that Cage treated
the human voice in the very same way the
composers of the Baroque did – as yet another
instrument, to be tuned and used to its limits.
His favourite instrument was actually the
voice of Cathy Berberian, for whom Aria was
written. On this recording, Isherwood proves
himself to be an attentive custodian of Cage’s
music. In the unpublished Chant with Claps,
his folksy rendition brings to mind some of
the recordings of Appalachian songs by Custer
LaRue and emphasizes the improbable: John
Cage, the composer, the experimenter, the
rebel, the visionary was also a balladeer. This
is a great education for the ears – wide open.
Robert Tomas
Charles Heller – Tramvay Lider
Charles Heller; Bram Goldhammer
Independent (ecanthuspress.com)
!!
Riding transit at
rush hour or late at
night is rarely fun
(save the rare times
one encounters live
music and dancing on
a subway car). A sea
of weary, sallow faces
(is it the lighting?)
can certainly make one feel equally grey and
tired but it must have been far more grim
during the Great Depression in Toronto. One
streetcar conductor, Shimen Nepom, member
of a far-left group known as the Proletarian
Poets, decided to mine his oftentimes frigid
and tedious journey by turning his experiences
into a set of Yiddish poems entitled
Tramvay Lider (Streetcar Songs), published
in 1940 by the Toronto Labour League.
Seventy years later, composer Charles Heller
learned of Nepom through Gerry Kane, a
columnist with the Canadian Jewish News
who remembered meeting Nepom when he
was a young boy riding the streetcar with
his father. Heller then researched the poems,
set them to music and now performs them
eloquently, yet characteristically on this
recording, accompanied by pianist Bram
Goldhammer and cellist Rachel Pomedli. The
music evokes the clattering tracks, the ringing
bells, the bitter winds, but best of all, the
poignant stories of the great variety of people
who rode the College streetcar back then.
Dianne Wells
Songs from the Rainshadow’s Edge – a song
cycle by Benton Roark
Arkora
Redshift Records TK444 (redshiftmusic.
org)
!!
Anyone who has
lived in Vancouver will
be familiar with the
term “rainshadow”
which, in turn,
conveys the elusiveness
of sunshine. This
lends a rather dreamy, mystical aura to the
area and the rainshadow’s edge mirrors that
same misty, shimmering border between
contrasting states of the psyche. Scored for
soprano, flute, viola, bass, electric guitar,
percussion and narrator, drawing on texts by
Huxley, Carroll, Eckhart, Sartre and composer
Benton Roark, the multi-layered five-part
song cycle takes the listener on a Jungian
journey beyond the edge and back again.
The composer, who based the work on his
recollection of a state of depersonalization
after a series of crises, did well in selecting
the ensemble to perform it. Arkora, a selfdescribed
new music collective dedicated to
contemporary vocal chamber music in its
many forms and led by soprano Kathleen
Allan, clearly possesses the fluidity to skillfully
evoke the surreal experience of “loss
of self” and the struggle between inner and
outer realities. Allan’s purity of vocal tone is
perfection in its adaptations through the everchanging
mix of genres and mysterious landscape
of instrumental timbre.
Dianne Wells
EARLY MUSIC AND PERIOD PERFORMANCE
Purcell – Dido & Aeneas
Rachel Lloyd; Robert Davies; Elin Manahan
Thomas; Armonico Consort; Christopher
Monks
Signum Classics SIGCD417
!!
This new recording
of Dido and Aeneas
could be described as
lean. The orchestra
consists of five stringplayers
(one to a part
with the double bass
doubling the cello
line) and one theorbo.
The chorus consists of eight singers, two to a
part. (I am going by the booklet which comes
with the CD. There appear to be some uncredited
wind players in the Overture as well as
guitars in the First Act Chaconne). By contrast
the performance conducted by Nicholas
McGegan (Harmonia Mundi) has an orchestra
of 22 players and a choir of 33 voices. The
performance conducted by Emanuelle Haïm
(Virgin) has a smaller choir (14) but an even
larger orchestra (26).
There is a reason for the small forces used
here: the earliest performance of the work
that can be documented was at Josias Priest’s
School for Gentlewomen in 1689. It has
generally been assumed that that was the first
performance of the work. In 1992, however,
two musicologists published an article
in which they suggested that the school
performance would have been a revival and
that the first performance, possibly at court,
would have used larger forces.
Many readers will be mainly concerned
with the quality of the mezzo-soprano
who sings Dido. There are several great
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