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United States Various, ‘The World at War: In Memoriam I & II’: Brooklyn Art Song Society, First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, New York. Filmed on 7.10.2022 and 4.11.2022 and obtainable on Brooklyn Art Song Society Digital Concert Hall. (RP)
The Brooklyn Art Song Society has opened its 2022/23 season with ‘The World at War’, a sequence of six live shows dedicated to songs related to the nice international conflicts of the 20th century. The first two live shows, entitled ‘In Memoriam’, are actually obtainable on the Brooklyn Art Song Society Digital Concert Hall.
Expertly and sensitively curated by Michael Brofman, BASS’s founder and inventive director, the 2 recitals include music and phrases by males whose lives had been impacted by World War I. Some fought and died on the entrance, whereas those that returned had been usually haunted for the remainder of their lives by what they skilled. There are additionally works by composers who noticed from a distance, separated from the battle by location or time and, in fact, some who had been simply unfortunate.
Texts, biographical data and insights into the music afford the chance to discover the tales of the composers and poets in depth. However, none of that is important to benefit from the performances of those songs born of innocence and despair, carried out by an distinctive cadre of artists. High sound high quality is crucial, and BASS delivers on that account.
The first recital opened with baritone Mario Diaz-Moresco’s witty and complicated efficiency of Francis Poulenc’s Banalités. Poulenc was conscripted into the French military close to the top of the warfare and served time on the entrance. The poet whose phrases Poulenc set was Guillaume Apollinaire, who was wounded through the warfare, solely to die through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
Drafted into the Austrian military in 1915, Alban Berg hoped that the warfare would cleanse Europe of the rot that had beset it for many years. Having served for eleven months, he was discharged from lively obligation after a psychological breakdown. Baritone Sidney Outlaw discovered the lyricism in Berg’s Vier Gesänge, which made his efficiency of them particularly satisfying.
Maurice Ravel tried to affix the French air pressure however was rejected on account of his age (he was 40) and a well being situation. He finally grew to become a truck driver, delivering munitions at night time underneath heavy German bombardment. Ravel’s Deux Mélodies hébraïques date from 1914, and mezzo-soprano Kate Maroney was charming as she sang the beguiling melodies with wealthy tone and a nuanced strategy to musical line.
Returning to Europe from the United States of America, Enrique Granados and his spouse drowned after the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1916. His Canciones amatorias date from the prior yr. Soprano Amy Owens gave a glowing account of the charming melodies in Granados’s settings of Renaissance love poems.
The solely American whose music was featured within the two recitals was Charles Ives. An insurance coverage government, Ives was too outdated to serve within the warfare however was an advocate for insuring troopers’ lives, which saved innumerable households of veterans from monetary smash. Outlaw captured the solemnity and the heartache of ‘In Flanders Field’, Ives’ setting of Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s well-known poem, written by the Canadian physician the day after he noticed a buddy fall in battle.
Pianist Spencer Myer was equally adept at capturing Poulenc’s refined temper adjustments and the brilliance and wonder in Granados’s extra vigorous accompaniments, in addition to his piece for piano, ‘Los requiebros’, with its fast-changing tempi and colours. Whether taking part in Berg with crystalline precision or banging away on the piano in Ives’s ‘He is There!’, Michael Brofman was in his ingredient.
The second live performance was devoted to works by British poets and composers. Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen are among the many most well-known of the War Poets, however numerous males, together with extraordinary troopers, wrote of the horrors from the trenches, or penned eloquent elegies for the lifeless. Collectively, they gave voice to the dashed hopes, disillusionment and sorrows of a era.
Songs by Ivor Gurney and the up to date British composer Iain Bell had been first heard intertwined to create a story of a soldier’s story. Gurney was a poet in addition to a composer, who exhibited indicators of psychological sickness earlier than the warfare, which was exacerbated by being gassed on the entrance. The three songs by Gurney adopted the arc of his life, written when he was a pupil, a soldier within the trenches and, lastly, whereas confined to an asylum.
In The Undying Splendor, Bell set choices from an anthology of poems by Sergeant John William Streets, who died on the Somme whereas going to assistance from a wounded soldier. (The Battle of the Somme was one of many deadliest ever, claiming over a million lives.) Streets’s poems chart the inner journey of a soldier, together with his pondering on how historical past would recall him and his fallen comrades.
Tenor Dylan Morrongiello and baritone Brian James Myer shared duties within the efficiency of the Gurney and Bell songs. The timbers of their voices had been remarkably alike, and every sang with equal depth.
Thomas Hardy wrote the poem ‘Channel Firing’ in 1914, simply previous to the graduation of hostilities in Europe. In addition to expressing his disdain for warfare, he was prescient in his sense of foreboding that historical past was about to repeat itself.
Gerald Finzi. who was too younger and asthmatic to serve within the First World War, was deeply affected by the loss of life of Ernest Fararr, his trainer, on the Western Front. He set Hardy’s phrases to music in 1949, when the destruction of the Second World War was nonetheless recent in his and the world’s minds. Myer captured the highly effective darkness of the tune and gave fantastic characterizations of the animals that seem in it.
Iain Venables’ Through These Pale Cold Days, scored for tenor, viola and piano, was commissioned along with the centenary commemorations of the Great War and premiered in 2016. Venables set poems by 5 warfare poets who vary from the well-known – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon – to the obscure, similar to Francis St. Vincent Morris. The most colourful of the lot was Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy, affectionately often called ‘Woodbine Willie’. The Anglican priest and poet disbursed cigarettes in addition to consolation to troopers, and was admired for his bravery underneath hearth whereas rescuing the wounded.
Morrongiello captured the darkness and the lyricism in Venables’s songs, probably the most poignant of which is ‘Procrastination’, by which a soldier ponders whether or not he’ll die earlier than he experiences his youth.
There was poetry in ending ‘In Memoriam’ with George Butterworth’s settings of six songs from A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman. Butterworth composed them between1909 and 1911, when he was in his mid-twenties and, 5 years later, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet through the Battle of the Somme. His physique was swiftly buried within the facet of the ditch and by no means recovered.
Baritone Steven Eddy gave a chilling account of the ultimate tune, ‘Is My Team Ploughing?’, a dialog between the residing and the lifeless. However, it was the second of the six, ‘When I Was One-and-Twenty’, by which he captured the innocence and insouciance of a youth that was perpetually misplaced for untold thousands and thousands within the warfare to finish all wars.
Rick Perdian
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The World at War: In Memoriam I
Poulenc – Banalités / Mario Diaz-Moresco (baritone), Spencer Myer (piano)
Berg – Vier Gesänge, Op.2 / Sidney Outlaw (baritone), Michael Brofman (piano)
Ives – Three Songs of the War / Sidney Outlaw (baritone), Kate Maroney (mezzo-soprano), Stanichka Dimitrova (violin), Michael Brofman (piano)
Ravel – Deux Mélodies hébraïques / Kate Maroney (mezzo-soprano), Michael Brofman (piano)
Granados – ‘Los requiebros’ (from Goyescas) / Spencer Myer (piano), Canciones amatorias / Amy Owens (soprano), Spencer Myer (piano)
The World at War: In Memoriam II
Gurney – ‘Desire in Spring’, ’Sleep’, ‘By a Bierside’ / Brian James Myer (baritone), Brent Funderburk (piano)
Iain Bell – ‘Lark Above the Trenches’, ‘Comrades’, ‘Gallipoli’ (from The Undying Splendor) / Dylan Morrongiello (tenor), Brent Funderburk (piano)
Finzi – ‘Channel Firing’, Op.16 No.5 (from Before and After Summer) / Brian James Myer (baritone), Brent Funderburk (piano)
Iain Venables – Through These Pale Cold Days, Op.46 / Dylan Morrongiello (tenor), Chieh-Fan Yiu (viola), Brent Funderburk (piano)
Butterworth – Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad / Steven Eddy (baritone), Michael Brofman (piano)