Tarot is a new recital CD from tenor Timothy Stoddard and pianist Ellen Fast featuring recent works by American composers.  There are four song cycles on the record.  The first, Mortally Wounded, features settings by Mark Markowski of eight poems by Lorca in English translation.  These are interesting and treat Lorca’s quintessentially Spanish themes sympathetically.  The music is basically tonal but complex with flamenco inflected rhythms.  It’s beautifully sung and played with diction so good that the absence of texts and translations is not worrisome.

I was less taken by Romance Suite, a setting by Alaina Ferris of love poems by Shakespeare, Jenny Xie and Desiree C. Bailey.  The settings are gentle and cleave too close to the Great American Songbook for my taste.  Of course, that’s something of a bugbear of mine and if you are a GASB fan you might like them.

A Fire Within by Michael Lanci sets poems by Peter Mason about the more physically and psychologically destructive aspects of fire.  There’s a kind of relentless horror in the texts that inspires a grand, emotional and dramatic setting.  Uncomfortable listening but very good stuff.

Tarot sets nine very short texts by Amanda Hollander; each inspired by a Tarot card.  Mary Prescott’s settings are as varied in mood as the texts.  At times the vocal line is quite conversational and at others aggressively bombastic.  The piano parts tend towards an insistentkly repetitive minimalism.  There’s certainly enough variety to sustain interest.

There’s some very classy singing and playing here and it’s well captured on the recording made at Audible Images Recording Studio in Pittsburgh in 2022.  It’s a digital only release with MP3 and CD quality and 96kHz/24bit FLAC options.  I listened to the hi-res version.  There’s no booklet but there’s equivalent information on the album page on the Navona web site.

Catalogue number: Navona records NV6502