Bridge keep a low profile so you might be forgiven for knowing
little about them. Have a look at their website. They have eleven
volumes of the music of Crumb, four of Stefan Wolpe, six of Elliott
Carter, three of Mario Davidovsky, two of Stephen Jaffe, four
of Poul Ruders, and a speckle of Wuorinen, Imbrie, Wernick, Lerdahl,
Riegger, Perle, Lansky, Machover, Schuller, Bland, Harbison, Feldman
and much else. I should also mention their 20+ volumes of historic
Library of Congress chamber recordings and their enterprisingly
open-minded reissues of Karl Krueger’s 1960s SPAMH analogue tapes
of American orchestral music of the 19th-20th
centuries – vital if this song collection enthuses you . House
artists with a strong representation in the Bridge lists include
Garrick Ohlsson, Bennett Lerner, Lambert Orkis and David Starobin.
Virgil Thomson is
represented by The Feast of Love, music very different from the
clever folksy-populist collage of the Pare
Lorentz scores of the 1930s - The Plow that Broke the Plains
and The River (also recorded by Kapp). This is more
akin to the unashamed romanticism of Autumn for harp and
strings (see
review). With its gawky fascinating rhythmic setting of parts
of the Pervigilium Veneris - the same sensuous poem set
by George Lloyd – we encounter a Thomson adopting an idiom recalling
Copland's Old American Songs but with a dash or ten of
Finzi along the way (3:02). Carpenter wrote several song-cycles
including one setting songs from Gitanjali
several of which were recorded by Rose
Bampton. Carpenter’s songs with piano are sampled at length
on Albany TROY388. This one is subtly coloured and contoured with
a Gallic accent that coasts very close to Ravel in On a Screen
and to the lapidary orchestration of Canteloube in The
Odalisque. There’s also an undertow from Coleridge-Taylor
and even Ketèlbey. Highwaymen is Carpenter in the grand
manner of Turandot, indeed Puccini must have registered
strongly with Carpenter. Yet at 2:15 onwards the music breaks
into a jazzy outburst that recurs. The final song To a Young
Gentleman is instantly memorable and has some of the energetic
charge of Sondheim's Pacific Overtures mixed with a hint
of Bantock. The sing-song refrain Not that that would very
much please me is catchy. The song and the cycle end with
a clever half-squeak half-yawn.
Then comes a complete
gear-change from the much more knowing Roy Harris. The 19th
century is left behind and Harris instead calls up a symphonic
power even if the Whitman words set are from the late 19th
century. It has that frontiersman defiance. Harris was a remarkably
original composer and his setting of Give Me the Splendid Silent
Sun is typical and full of enthralling writing ranging from
licking woodwind and string tendrils and an angular oratorical
style. The vocal line is heavy with both nobility and ecstasy.
Griffes five short oriental poems take us back to the world of
Carpenter, Bantock and Mahler and of the writings of Lafcadio
Hearn. These songs are perfect little aquatints written in a softly
lyrical style with an oriental swerve to the line. As if to confirm
the Bantock connection the last song is A Feast of Lanterns
which was also set by Bantock. The name of Horatio Parker
may well be known to you for his organ work, his oratorio Hora
Novissima and possibly for his powerful Northern Ballad
for orchestra (see
review). The Rhapsody for baritone and orchestra, Cahal
Mor of the Wine Red Hand is in late-romantic style using an
orchestral apparatus that is heavier than that of Griffes or Carpenter
- more Wagnerian-Tchaikovskian. It has just a dash of sentimentality
with reminders of Bantock and Hiawatha’s Onaway Awake Beloved.
Bantock’s Five Ghazals of Hafiz would in fact have fitted
well amid these cycles – if only in stylistic terms. A lightness
of spirit enters in the second song and there is melodrama the
visionary dream of A Skeleton in the manner of Longfellow.
The refrain binds the cycle together and the harpist’s delicacy
brings it to an end.
The words are printed
in full in the booklet and the font size makes reading the notes
and poems no challenge at all.
All that remains
is to ask Mason, Mann, the Odense players and Bridge for a sequel
or better yet several. I know there are more Carpenter song
cycles with orchestra and surely Farwell, Loeffler and others
could fill out the picture. Certainly there are other Roy Harris
works with voice and orchestra: Canticle to the Sun and
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.
Rob Barnett
Reviews of Carpenter on MusicWeb International:
Piano music on New
World
Symphonies 1 and 2 on Naxos
Patrick Mason
(baritone) 
