A Brilliant Spectrum of Repertoire!

Virgil Thomson’s elegant and fastidious Four Songs Set to the Poems of Thomas Campion are as much a reflection of the personality of the composer himself as they are elements of the music. Thomson celebrated what he called “vertical, undifferentiated counterpoint,” and the Four Songs all exhibit this to a greater or lesser degree. The charm and the skill of the writing manage to artfully camouflage this attempt at simplicity of expression. When combined with the relentless diatonic harmony Thomson favors, one might be tempted to dismiss this music as simplistic and naive, but it is precisely these qualities of simplicity and innocence which befit Campion’s beautiful texts so perfectly. Originally written for solo mezzo-soprano with clarinet, harp, and viola accompaniment, Thomson and Ruggero Vené later recast the songs for chorus with piano accompaniment.

Campion’s verse There is a Garden in Her Face regards the features of a beautiful young woman, and, with metaphor, likens them to fruits and flowers. Thomson’s sweet, piquant melodies and harmonies perfectly reflect the poet’s colorful portraiture.

Irving Fine’s small but precious legacy of compositions is one of the real treasures of American music. Few other American composers so felicitously combine an almost Ravel-like delicacy and love of detail and craft with a real “American-sounding” harmonic syntax and gift for melody.

The Spectrum Singers have championed the cause of Irving Fine’s music since the chorus’s first season some forty-four years ago, and it has been gratifying to note the increasing frequency with which one encounters this splendid composer’s works in the local concert venues. Fine was born in Boston in 1914 and attended Harvard where he studied with Walter Piston and was accompanist with G. Wallace Woodworth’s Harvard Glee Club. He studied further with Nadia Boulanger, taught music at Harvard from 1939 to 1950, and then moved on to Brandeis where he remained until his untimely death in 1962, only 47 years of age and on the brink of international recognition. The Hour-Glass stems from 1949, and in many ways is the composer’s magnum opus for chorus. This notwithstanding, The Hour-Glass, a choral suite based on the elegant and eloquent verse of Ben Jonson, is also among the finest of a cappella works in the entire choral repertoire.

One need only read Jonson’s text of The Hour-Glass, the last work in the suite, to appreciate the perfect match which exists between Fine’s elegantly crafted music and Jonson’s evocative verse. The poet views an hour-glass, and opines that the material constantly passing through it may not be sand, but perhaps the ashes of a wounded lover who, like a fly, playing in a candle’s flame, was so consumed by his beloved that he was burned to cinders by the mere glance of her eye. And if this remarkable conceit were not enough, the poet goes on to muse on how much like an “unblessed” life these flowing cinders represent—that they symbolize the tensions and agony which difficult love creates in life, that the cinders of this unlucky lover, even in death as in life, still find no rest as they ceaselessly cycle and flow through the hour-glass. This is shiver-producing stuff, as is Fine’s music, profoundly centered within a heartbreakingly beautiful and emotional lyricism.

Samuel Barber had a native passion for Celtic, particularly Irish, literature. Acknowledged as a masterpiece of American choral literature, Reincarnations, like his first songs, are settings of works by Irish poet James Stephens. Barber considered himself an honorary Irishman. He loved the land and its people, their melancholy strain, their wild humor, their verbal felicity.

The Coolin, the third piece in the song cycle, falls into the traditional category of love song or praises of a beautiful woman. The title refers to a lock of hair or “curleen” that grew on a young girl’s neck and came to be a term for one’s sweetheart. Stephens wrote: “I sought to represent that state which is almost entirely a condition of dream wherein the passion of love has almost overreached itself and is sinking into a motionless languor.” Barber uses a gentle siciliano rhythm for this old Irish love song, filtered through Stephens’s romantic poetry.

Ernst Bacon is best known today for some 250 solo songs, most of which are set to American poets, Whitman and Dickinson in particular. His several works for chorus are deftly crafted. Three American Songs were published in 1954 and are drawn from traditional American sources. Quite different from one another, the set of three form a powerful and poignant triptych.

John Hardy is a tale about John Wesley Hardin, or Harding, depending on the source. A ruthless outlaw who shot people dead just because he did not like the way they looked, he nonetheless became a folk hero—almost a Robin Hood character, thought to be kind to the poor, not unlike a later Depression desperado, Pretty Boy Floyd. Bacon’s portrait is granitic and appropriately sinister with a driving and dissonant “saloon piano” accompaniment.

The Colorado Trail, with its tenor and soprano solos, its simple but exquisite piano cantilena, and its wordless choral accompaniment evokes pathos and the murmur of prairie winds with its story of a beautiful “kept woman,” the bird in a cage, dying for freedom.

The third song, Shouting Pilgrim, begins with a driven, motoric accompaniment for piano four-hands, and then pushes aside all that comes before it with a torrent of religious zeal in a warlike “hymn” which conjures a marching army calling for ever more volunteers to its cause. Almost terrifying in its focused intensity, it builds to a brilliant climax, lifting sopranos to a high C at the end.

Charles Ives is among the most remarkable of American composers. After having been a moderately successful composer in his early days, he abruptly gave up music later in life, and spent his remaining years as an insurance salesman. Due much to the efforts of Aaron Copland, and later, Leonard Bernstein, Ives’s music has enjoyed a much-deserved renaissance. 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of Ives’s birth, and appropriate celebrations of this event are occurring nation-wide. The Spectrum Singers have sung Ives regularly throughout the chorus’s 44-year history and are pleased to do so tonight and also on May 18, when his transcendental Psalm 90 will be performed.

As noted by Ives scholar and performer John Kirkpatrick in 1973:

The Circus Band is a strong mating of a boyhood march (dated 1894, originally for piano, full of age-19 high spirits, fully-lived), and some retrospective words (added years later, full of age-40s nostalgia for a vanished boyhood)—the whole orchestrated by George F. Roberts directly from 114 Songs with suggestions from Ives.

It is the orchestrated version that Alexander Dashnaw, a much-admired scholar and Professor Emeritus of Music at Long Island University - C.W. Post Campus, arranged for mixed chorus with piano duet accompaniment in 1953.

The Circus Band recalls the composer’s youth and the sights and sounds of marching bands and parades. The raucous ending’s final note gives out an amusing tongue-in-cheek exclamation which has lately become an oft-used mono-syllabic term of denial.

Cole Porter, American playboy, son of a rich industrialist, wrote music—mostly very good music—for just the joy of it. A continent-hopping, carefree gadabout, Porter’s life and music are aptly described by one of his Broadway show’s titles: Anything Goes. Whatever struck Porter’s fancy, he composed music which would richly embody his subject. In the Still of the Night is a striking example of this—a poignant, pleading song, here richly arranged for chorus by Ralph Hunter in 1939. Porter’s gifts of complex chromatic melody and his extraordinary skill with writing and setting the English language are very evident here in what is truly one of the great love songs.

Several composers, enamored of Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs originally written for solo baritone, have created choral settings of several songs in the cycle. The most felicitous of these are those by the composer’s friend and colleague, Irving Fine, whom Copland affectionately referred to as “Oiv.” Fine’s expertly and lovingly crafted choral settings elevate these already wonderful solos to a higher level of expression and emotion than one might have thought possible. The story told in Long, Long Ago becomes all the more poignant when the early, sunny mood of the song darkens to tell of an unexpected and tragic loss.

Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land, first performed in 1954, is set on a farm in the American Midwest during the 1930s. The music is cut from the same cloth as that of Appalachian Spring—the melodic, easygoing, folkish vein that Copland could so masterfully create.

The Promise of Living closes the opera’s first act. Building up in texture from single vocal lines through duets and trios, the music progresses through a soprano/alto duet against a hymn-like accompaniment in the lower voices to its finale, a grand chorale of five voices in triple time accompanied by a flowing triplet obbligato, climaxing in a triple-fortissimo at the top of the chorus’s range.

Gabriel Fauré completed his student years at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris on July 28, 1865. He had just won the Premiere Prix in composition with his Cantique de Jean Racine. This precocious early opus (#11) exhibits many signs of a great lyric composer. Apparent in this brief but moving work are the unique harmonic style and gift for seductive melody which come to full fruition in the songs and orchestral compositions yet to come.

Gustav Holst is best known to concertgoers for his very popular 1919 orchestral suite The Planets. But church musicians know that Holst also wrote a large body of very effective music for choirs. He grew up idolizing Wagner, and in 1895 while a student at the Royal College of Music he met Ralph Vaughan Williams where the two became good friends. Holst later became infatuated with Hindu literature and philosophy and left his musical studies to learn Sanskrit. He returned to the College, studied trombone, played in wind ensembles, began teaching, was among the first to revive and be an advocate for the music of Henry Purcell, and began conducting choirs in schools. His big success with The Planets, sadly, served only to bewilder him. He became introverted and withdrew from public life. A series of illnesses was broken by a visit to Harvard as Guest Lecturer in Music in 1932, but he fell ill again that spring and died in London—far too soon—in 1934.

Come to Me, written in 1903, was intended to be the fifth of Holst’s Five Part Songs, op. 12, but for reasons unclear, it and the third song were left behind when three of their brethren were published by Novello many years ago. Perhaps Holst felt that the frankly romantic text and the rich, heartfelt music to match it did not project a persona appropriate to his later life, or the song harbored a poignant or wistful memory he later chose to forget—we will never know. In any case, Come to Me is extraordinarily beautiful, very much worthy of being heard. The Spectrum Singers were privileged to give the first United States performance of this work in 1992 through the gracious assistance of the Holst estate and Faber Music in London. The work has now—finally and thankfully—been published by Faber.

Béla Bartók made his first contact with folk music scholar Zoltán Kodály in 1905, and together they began to collect and publish folk songs. In 1906, the two began extensive travels in Hungary and surrounding regions and recorded songs using early phonograph equipment. Bartók and Kodály took some of the songs they had collected and harmonized and arranged them for performance, of which tonight’s 1917-composed Four Slovak Folk Songs is an example. In these, Bartók, unlike Brahms, retained the original modal characteristics of the folk melodies he used and only embellished them with modern harmonizations and accompaniments. Bartók’s scholarly work in folk music is as important as his accomplishments as a composer, and indeed, these two aspects of his life’s work are highly complementary.

One of the great joys of every serious singer is the vocal music of Johannes Brahms. The scope, variety, depth of emotion, and sheer artfulness of this body of work is unmatched in the late romantic repertoire. Very few composers have written so rich a variety of works for the voice that somehow speak so directly to the soul of the performer and listener, though Schubert and Mahler are certainly worthy of the same esteem. Choral singers love this music unabashedly—choral directors, too. And this genre was certainly important to Brahms—vocal works total more than half of his musical output.

Waldesnacht, redolent of the atmosphere of the dark green woods, dates from 1874 and is notable for its rich harmonic progressions, suspensions, and sense of repose. Der Abend, written but one year later is a concise masterwork, painting in almost operatic colors the symbolic descent of the sun in the form of Phoebus (Apollo) and his chariot, being welcomed into the sea at sunset by his lover Thetis, as Cupid leads the exhausted horses to a cooling stream.

Brahms’s two sets of Liebeslieder, set generally in waltz meter and scored for vocal quartet with piano duet, have been enthusiastically embraced by musicians and music lovers since the moment of their publication, and no wonder! Love songs of the highest order, both op. 52 and 65 collections run the gamut of emotion and melody. The earlier op. 52, however, sound somewhat pale in comparison to the later and darker op. 65. While op. 52 addresses love from a relatively positive and somewhat naive philosophical perspective, op. 65 deals quite forthrightly with the pleasures as well as the considerably challenging difficulties of amorous human relationships. A predominance of heavily chromatic harmony and minor key settings underscore the more serious nature of this latter opus. The music becomes more darkly passionate as a result, as it paints the foibles of the human condition.

The set opens with a volcanic eruption from the piano, and only a few times thereafter does the mood soften or relax. Bliss, seduction, jealousy, anger, and torment are all encountered en route to the finalé. And, for the text of that finalé, Brahms turns to Goethe, perhaps Germany’s greatest poet, for solace among the muses, who alone, the poet and composer opine, can calm the stormy seas of the human condition. This finalé is unique to both sets of Liebeslieder, as it is not a waltz at all. The accompaniment is a passacaglia, set in 9/4, reminiscent of sustained and pizzicato strings together, almost serenade-like, with a sense of relief and resignation about it, much as one might feel after a particularly arduous and ultimately unresolved argument. Heady stuff, this music, but after all, so are the subjects it attempts to embrace.

~ Program Notes © 2024 by John W. Ehrlich