United States Various – ‘Human Nature’: Lucy Fitz Gibbon (soprano), Thomas Meglioranza (baritone), Richard Powers (narrator), Decoda. Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York, 11.2.2025. (RP)
R. Schumann – ‘Eintritt’ (Waldszenen, Op.82), ‘Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend’
C. Schumann – ‘Geheimes Flüstern hier und dort’ (arr. Clara Lyon)
G. Mahler – ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’ (arr. Brad Balliett)
A. Mahler – ‘Licht in der Nacht’ (arr. Terry Cook)
Schoenberg – Verklärte Nacht, Op.4
David Kirkland Garner, Stephen Jaffe, Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner – A Forest Unfolding
The artist-led musical collective Decoda has a home at Carnegie Hall. Founded in 2012 by former members of Ensemble Connect, Decoda is the only independent group recognized as an affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, but its mission extends far beyond this venue.
‘Music for Transformation’ is the ensemble’s partnership with communities of incarcerated musicians across the US. The project has yielded hundreds of original songs and other works that Decoda has performed around the globe, including at the White House during the Obama administration. This concert marked the Carnegie Hall debut of composer Terry Cook, a participant in the program, with Decoda’s performance of his arrangement of Alma Mahler’s song, ‘Licht in der Nacht’.
In a program entitled ‘Human Nature’, Decoda was joined by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and baritone Thomas Meglioranza. The theme could easily have lent itself to a psychological study of the composers whose music was performed in the first half of the concert – Clara and Robert Schumann, Gustav and Alma Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg – but the focus was on the natural world.
The musical journey began aptly with a jaunty account of ’Eintritt’ (‘Entrance’) from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’), in an arrangement for chamber ensemble. Happiness quickly yielded to regret in ‘Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend’ (‘Longing for Woodland’) sung by Meglioranza. His expressiveness and attention to text equaled by that of Lucy Fitz Gibbon in Clara Schumann’s ‘Geheimes Flüstern hier und dort’ (‘Secret Whisperings Here and There’), which hails the forest as a sacred space.
Violinist Clara Lyon’s evocative arrangement of the Clara Schumann song was one of two by members of Decoda. Brad Balliett, a founding member and former Artistic Director of the ensemble, arranged Gustav Mahler’s ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’ (‘I Walked Joyfully through a Green Wood’) with a lighthearted touch. The violins captured the singing of the nightingales to perfection.
Alma Mahler’s ’Licht in der Nacht’ (‘A Nocturnal Light’) expresses far more ominous sentiments, which Cook expressed in music laden with tension. The poem begins with a person alone in the black of night, the mystery of which Cook summoned in shimmering yet foreboding music. He spun a dreamlike air when depicting a yellow star in the sky but evoked dread in the final stanza through a terrifying musical evocation of impending death.
The emotional apex of the concert was Decoda’s performance of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’). The tone poem depicts a moonlight encounter between two lovers, with the woman pregnant by another man. Her lover agrees to transfigure the unborn child by making it his own. Decoda’s scintillating sound wrapped the complex situation in beauty and mystery. Violinist Anna Elashvili and cellist Hannah Collins’s sensuous playing combined to express the rapture of the two lovers, reconciled with each other and nature.
The second half of the concert featured the Carnegie Hall premiere of A Forest Unfolding. The self-styled eco-cantata was inspired by the ability of trees to communicate with one another which, surprisingly, is not a figment of a Tree Hugger’s imagination. Research indicates that trees are indeed connected through an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain. Through this network, trees can alert each other to dangers, such as insect infestations, and share nutrients.
A Forest Unfolding traces the narrative arc of human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the cooperation that links a forest together. It was a collaborative effort on all levels with author Richard Powers, environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof and novelist Kim Stanley Robinson choosing the texts that were set to music by composers David Kirkland Garner, Stephen Jaffe, Eric Moe and Melinda Wagner.
The nine-movement cantata is comprised of arias, spoken prose excerpts and instrumental passages. Musically, the piece is connected by references to the final section of ‘Der Abschied’ (‘The Farewell’) from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (‘The Song of the Earth’). Those final measures also provide a textural link, as the song’s last lines are a hymn to nature, especially the earth’s rebirth each spring.
Moe captured the disconnect between man and nature in a lyrical, quizzical setting of Merwin’s ‘Native Trees’, sung with a lovely sparkle by Fitz Gibbon. Its concluding measures contained the clearest Mahler quote, which punctuated a child’s dismay over his parents’ lack of interest in the trees that witnessed all of their births. Meglioranza sang with boyish wonder when telling of trees he was forbidden to climb but which carried him in their branches in Jaffe’s setting of Merwin’s poem with an appropriate one-word title, ‘Trees’.
Melinda Wagner quoted Mahler’s final expressions of ‘Ewig’ (‘Forever’) from ‘Der Abschied’ in the violin in her setting of Wendell Berry’s ‘In a Country Once Forested’. The American author and environmental activist wrote, ‘We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it’. Fitz Gibbon and Meglioranza expressed, with poignancy, young woodlands remembering the now-gone, older forests and the yearnings of soil under the pavement now dreaming of grass.
Powers narrated texts to music composed by Garner. His voice resonated with authority in a passage from The Book of Job; and with sentimental yearning, tempered by wisdom, in Anne LaBastille’s ‘From Woodsman’, which featured some fine playing from clarinetist Paul Wonjin Cho. Powers injected wry humor into Thoreau’s depiction of a person falling in love with a shrub oak.
A Forest Unfolding ended with Powers reading from his novel, The Overstory, which addresses the destruction of forests across many generations. He spoke of trees as a social phenomenon where there are no individuals. Fitz Gibbon and Meglioranza sang a vocalise that enriched Garner’s complex and fascinating musical texture, as did Cho’s clarinet playing. The work ended with the ethereal sound of Fitz Gibbon’s soprano floating over calm and beautiful music, which imparted hope, not despair.
Rick Perdian