Tag Archives: roven

The New American Art Song

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okulitchThe New American Art Song is a CD of, unsurprisingly, American art songs.  Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch is accompanied by the composers in four contrasting sets.  The first set is Quiet Lives by Ricky Ian Gordon; eight songs setting texts by various poets.  The music is tonal with occasional elements of minimalism but overall a bit of a retro “piano lounge” feel that didn’t particularly excite me.

Second up were two songs, Of Gods and Cats, by Jake Heggie to texts by Gavin Geoffrey Gillard.  These are sly, witty, jazzy and much more contemporary sounding.  Much more musically inventive too.  It’s easy to see why Heggie is in the upper tier of contemporary American composers.  The disc also has a bonus Heggie song; a setting of Browning’s Grow Old Along With Me, that I really liked.

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Innocence/Experience

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innocenceAmerican mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera, with pianist Myra Huang, has recently released a CD of songs by contemporary American composers titled Innocence/Experience.  There are four , fairly contrasting, sets of songs by different composers.  The first group are settings of texts by Garrison Keillor with music by Robert Aldridge.  The texts are predictably sentimental and the music is rather retro.  It sounds like it might have come from a musical comedy in the 1940s.  It’s not inappropriate for the texts but seems a little out of time.  It suits Rivera’s voice though.  Her strength is definitely in the lower register where there is a pleasing smokey tone.

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New Voices

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newvoicesNew Voices is the latest CD from the Brooklyn Art Song Society.  It features songs by Glen Roven, Michael Djupstrom, James Kallenbach and Herschel Gerfein.  What most struck me was the retro feel of all four composers’ works.  We are in a tonal sound world with occasional jazz/folk inflections and the piano line is clearly written to support the voice.  One might be listening to, say Ned Rorem.  I say this because it’s such a contrast with the songs being written by contemporary Canadian composers with their chromaticism, experimental and frequently changing time signatures and often almost adversarial relation between voice and piano.  Which one prefers, of course, is a matter of taste.

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