Saturday afternoon at 27 North Sherbourne Rachel Krehm and Janelle Fung presented an art song recital entitled The Enticing Sky.  The material chosen was interesting with a heavy bias to women composers, living composers and Canadian composers; sometimes all three at once.

We got extracts from Come Closer; settings of the poetry of Elizabeth Krehm by Ryan Trew, Ethel Smyth’s Three Songs of the Sea, Dorothy Chang’s Songs of Wood and Water, Anna Pidgorna’s Amphráin Eibhlín (the only non English language text) and Cecilia Livingston’s luna premit.

Picking some personal highlights I really liked the contrasts in the Smyth songs which range from crazy dramatic in Before the Squall to quite delicate and lyrical in After Sunset.  The Chang pieces are intriguing too.  There are four very short poems but there’s a lot of drama condensed into the music; again with some really percussive piano and declamatory singing giving way to something more lyrical.

There’s quite a story behind the text for Amphráin Eibhlín; a lament or keening song for Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s murdered husband.  It’s an emotionally charged text and the music fits; both the dramatic vocal line and the complex piano part.

Cecilia Livingston’s songs to the moon are quite wide ranging in mood with texts ranging from Virgil’s evocation of Dido lying alone thinking of Aeneas to Duncan McFarlane’s paper moon; a kaleidoscope of allusions about artificiality and identity or lack of it.  Typical Livingston music; complex, allusive and often surprising.

And, of course the Trew settings of poetry from Elizabeth Krehm’s journals from childhood through stormy adolescence to optimistic young adulthood.  The music is sensitive to the text and the delivery, of course, very personal to the singer.

The material presented placed a pretty wide range of demands on both pianist and singer and it was all handled well; drama contrasting with lyricism and complexity with simplicity.  I can’t help thinking it would have been even more effective in a larger space for the room used on Saturday could scarcely contain a dramatic soprano and some heavily percussive piano parts.  But that’s a trifle and it was good to hear such an unusual and thoughtfully planned recital.