United States Various: Tori Tedeschi Adams (soprano), Jesse Blumberg, Randall Scarlata (baritones), Michael Brofman, Laura Ward (piano). Brooklyn Art Song Society, First Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, Brooklyn, 2.2.2024. (RP)
Dominick Argento – The Andrée Expedition
Michael Djupstrom – 3 Teasdale Songs
Libby Larsen – The Other Side of Silence (BASS Commission, world premiere)
Reinaldo Moya – Nocturno (BASS Commission, world premiere)
This season, in a series called ‘Circles’, Brooklyn Art Song Society is exploring networks of composers who were friends, enemies, lovers, colleagues, inspiration and mentors. After delving into Brahms and the Schumanns, the Second Viennese School and Les Six, the focus shifted to ‘The Minnesota Connection’. It is a term applied to a school of composers with a special knack for composing music for the voice, who over the past seventy years transformed the North Star State into a bastion of American classical music.
Composers Libby Larsen and Reinaldo Moya, both of whom had songs cycles premiering at this concert, provided insights on their works and on just what the ‘Minnesota Sound’ is. They had no problem explaining how it began. Larsen named the late Dominick Argento, with whom she studied, as the pivotal figure in its birth and development.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, Argento moved to Minneapolis in 1958 to teach at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music Theory and Composition. ‘I do think of myself as a Minnesota composer’, Argento once said in an interview, and he went on to describe his ‘love affair with my community here’.
In his vocal works, explained Larsen, Argento emphasized sound over text, an approach that sprang in part from his working environment. Minnesota is at the heart of the ‘choral belt’ that runs through America’s Upper Midwest. Choral music, Larsen explained, is a beautiful aspect of life in Minnesota, and the state is home to thousands of choirs of all types. It is a place where ‘people just sing’ said Larsen, pointing to Bob Dylan and Prince, both native sons of the state, as further proof.
Larsen described Argento as a literary man who had a deep reverence for words and for the human voice as an instrument. This approach was evident in her new song cycle, The Other Side of Silence, which was commissioned by BASS. In extending the commission for the work, Michael Brofman, BASS’s artistic director, suggested that Larsen might consider setting texts by George Eliot, the pen name of English writer Mary Ann Evans.
Finding the right ones was a task that Larsen compared to climbing Mt. Everest, although she ultimately settled on excerpts from three of Eliot’s novels – Adam Bede, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Larsen shaped the selected texts into a cycle exploring the human need to place brackets on infinity, whether in fondly recalling the transient joys of childhood, ruing the passing of the seasons or, indeed, death.
Like her teacher, Larsen also impresses with sound, although her setting of Eliot’s words was equally effective musically and emotionally. Soprano Tori Tedeschi Adams, who hails from Minnesota, negotiated the high leaps of ‘In Medias Res’ with ease, and sang of the inevitability of death in tones of soft resignation in ‘Commonplace’. In the same work, her voice as at its dreamiest when singing of a baby’s first moments in a mother’s arms.
Reinaldo Moya is a graduate of Venezuela’s El Sistema music education system. He has taught at several colleges in the state, as well serving as composer in residence for Minneapolis’s Schubert Club. Moya’s opera Memory Boy was premiered by the Minnesota Opera in 2016, and he has had numerous pieces performed by the Minnesota Orchestra.
As with Larsen, Brofman came prepared with a writer in mind when extending the commission to Moya. This time it was it was Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whose collection of short stories and poems entitled Azul, published in 1888, is considered as marking the start of the Spanish-American modernist movement.
Moya set four of Darío’s poems in Nocturno, a cycle that traces the passage of time from the beginning of night until daybreak. The thematic link to Larsen’s The Other Side of Silence was mere coincidence, but it connects both works to the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic when they were conceived.
With Brofman at the piano, as he was for the Larsen songs, baritone Jesse Blumberg gave a stylish account of Moya’s songs with a warm voice and engaging manner. His singing could be stalwart and declamatory in a song such as ‘Nocturno’, or soft and dreamlike in ‘La dulzura del ángelus’. Brofman was at his formidable best in expressing the wide range of emotions and sounds that course through the cycle, from Caribbean grooves to the gentle tolling of the Angelus bells.
The recital opened with Michael Djupstrom’s 3 Teasdale Songs, composed in 2010. He grew up in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and now calls Philadelphia home. Djupstrom is still a presence in his home state through Lakeshore Chamber Music, a concert series established in 2021 in White Bear to present Romanian chamber music along with traditional and contemporary classical works.
The songs served as an introduction to Minnesota Sound through Djupstrom’s use of melody and word painting for the voice, enlivened by an abundance of emotions expressed in the piano. The poems set by Djupstrom tell of the various stages of a love affair, which Adams depicted with wit and warmth. Brofman played the little burst of notes in the first song, ‘I Would Live in Your Love’, with delightful precision and lightness as if a meteor shower announced the awakening of love.
To conclude the concert, baritone Randall Scarlata and pianist Laura Ward performed Argento’s The Andrée Expedition. Argento received much acclaim for his song cycles, writing them for world-renowned singers such as Dame Janet Baker, Håkan Hagegård and Frederica von Stade. The Andrée Expedition is generally regarded as his most challenging cycle.
The backdrop for this song cycle, premiered by Hagegård in 1983, was the failed attempt by Swedish explorer Salomon Andrée and his companions, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg, to reach the North Pole by hot-air balloon. The men’s bodies were discovered thirty-three years later, along with postcards, diaries and notebooks that documented their moment of glory as they took off on their journey with much hoopla; their harrowing trek through the frozen north; and their growing certainty that they would not survive.
Scarlata sang Argento’s mostly quasi-recitative settings with crystal-clear diction and exceptional sensitivity to textual nuances. He has a sizeable voice, which permitted Ward to draw an equally wide range of emotions from the piano. At its fiercest and loudest, the emotional impact was overpowering.
There were happy moments, however. Scarlata’s voice bloomed when he sang of the young Strindberg’s boasting of their exploits in the first hours of the journey and his tender yearning for his ‘Dearest Anna’. As the story neared its end, however, the exhaustion in Scarlata’s voice reflected Strindberg’s deteriorating mental state as he penned birthday greetings to Anna, with the singer’s voice gaining briefly in warmth and beauty when he wrote of returning home to her.
In the ‘Epilogue’, Scarlata conjured up Fraenkel’s imagining of Andrée’s somewhat disquieting dreams of posthumous glory, which indeed did come to pass, in a firm voice that gleamed with pride. The sense of elation passed quickly, however, as the baritone depicted the howling winds of a Arctic winter night through agonizing cries of desperation, until there was only white, straight tone to express the final, fractured thoughts of a doomed man.
Rick Perdian