Thursday lunchtime at Metropolitan United was, I think, the first time I’ve attended a recital of music for soprano and clarinet.  The performers were soprano Noelle Slaney and clarinettist Matheus Coelho.  Most of the music was performed “as written” with a few pieces rearranged by Noelle.

The works were mostly by contemporary composers and the theme, as stated by Noelle, was “Suffering, Resilience and Hope” and right now we have enough of the former to require plenty of the other two.  T%he first piece was also the oldest; Vaughan Williams Three Vocalises which showed off Noelle’s rather good coloratura and was, emotionally, a gentle beginning.  hat followed was musically excellent but emotionally quite tough.

Jennifer Stevenson’s setting of Lory Bedikian’s Letter from Beirut could scarcely more timely.  It’s very beautiful (the tune is based on an Armenian lullaby) with a very cool clarinet part but the text hits hard “People have fled their homes/Children are dead” which could have been written anytime in the last fifty years including right now.

In some ways Lori Laitman’s I Never Saw Another Butterfly is even harder to take.  It sets fragments of poems written by children in Theresienstadt.  Where the writer is known, the date of death is 1944.  I’m sure you know the story.  Weirdly the settings are sometimes quite jolly which just makes the whole thing more jarring. The writing explores various ways of having instrument and voice interact which offers up lots of possibilities.

Jenni Brandon’s Multitudinous Stars and Spring Waters sets poems by Chinese women who weren’t supposed to be practicing an exclusively male form of expression.  Nature imagery is used largely to express a deep feeling of sadness.  Musically the piece is very much a conversation between voice and instrument.  I think they play together quite rarely though there’s a strong sense of interchanging moods and ideas.  Again, music of great beauty is paired with text that deals with a kind of yearning reaction to suffering.

The final set was much more upbeat.  The bouncy, tango like, Brazilian folk song Nesta Rua (arr. Jennifer Stevenson) was followed by Noelle’s arrangement of the Newfoundland traditional song The Banks of Newfoundland.  And so we closed with a journey from sunny Rio to the cold and foggy waters of the North Atlantic.

All in all a most interesting recital which shows just how good the Noon at Met free Thursday concerts can be.

As usual the whole thing is available to watch on YouTube.