February 6, 2017

• Music by Lehrman & Mandelbaum

   Harmonize Your Spirit With My Calm
  Helene Williams, soprano; Alexander Mikhalev, bass-baritone
  Meridian String Quartet
  St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Lande
  Ravello Records 7951
  Total Time:  76:07
  Recording:   ****/****
  Performance: ****/****

  The music of American-born composers Leonard Lehrman and Joel Mandelbaum are collected from some earlier Capstone releases to celebrate their heritage.  Both composers are descended from Russian Jews and the selections here include settings of Russian and American poetry as well as some chamber and orchestral works.  The compilation features a mixture of music by both composers from early works dating back to 1950 as well as a 2002 orchestral piece.  The two first connected in the 1970s and began programming each other’s music since that time.

  The album features three works by Leonard Lehrman (b. 1949).  It is but a small sample of the composer’s over 200 pieces running the gamut from opera, musical, and solo songs, to instrumental pieces and works for chorus.  His wife, Helene Williams, have performed together for decades.  She is but one of the voices in a collection of Eight Russian Songs.  The earliest setting dates from 1970.  Each has varied settings from solo voice (“Benediction”) to an almost Shostakovich-ian feel in the central Songs of Birds (1977).  The latter features an intriguing collection of instrumental accompaniment that includes cembalo.  This is overall fascinating and dramatic text setting with often beautiful folk-like lyricism infusing melodic lines.   Each explores qualities of the composer’s ancestral heritage.  The other song cycle here features settings of seven poems by labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964).  Based on a series of poems written to her lover in 1939, they reflect on different aspects of love.  The style here is fascinating often blending art song with perhaps a tough of period jazz rhythms and inflections. The recording features the composer and Williams from a Capstone release made back in 1997.  There is also a very brief orchestral work, lasting a minute, Bloody Kansas (1976).  It depicts the antislavery riots by John Brown and was commissioned as one of many vignettes commemorating U.S. history.  It is a fairly intense and dissonant little piece.

  Joel Mandelbaum (b.1932) studied with a host of important 20^th-Century American composers including Walter Piston, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Bernhard Heiden, and even Dallapiccola and Copland.  He has written numerous operas and many other works.  Some may even have used his reference book, based on his 1961 dissertation, Multiple Divisions of the Octave and the Tonal Resonance of 19-tone Temperament.  His 1950 Prelude, is the oldest work here on the album.  The brief piano piece, written when the composer was 17, shows some of the more tonal experiments of non-serial composers in that period.  It is performed here by Lehrman.  At the center of the disc are three orchestral works of which Mandelbaum’s are the outer selections between the aforementioned Bloody Kansas.  The first of these is a Chaconne (1977) based on an ascending chromatic 8-note pattern that moves to the fifth scale degree and back to “D”.  This ostinato then shifts through three keys moving up a half step, down a minor third and then slowly back to D through Db.  It is a quite tonal work.  The other orchestral piece, In Sainte-Chapelle (2002), grew out of the composer’s viewing of stained glass windows inspired by the book of Revelation.  The piece was set aside, and would become the source for the present work which wraps its musical ideas towards a better tomorrow in the wake of 9/11.  It is a rather gorgeous work with touching lyrical wind writing.  From here we move to a more cerebral chamber piece, after Lehrman’s love song cycle.  Mandelbaum’s second string quartet was composed between 1962 and 1978.  The period was rife with extensions of serialist compositional approaches and yet this is Mandelbaum’s main attempt at serial music.  The three movement work is based on a set of four notes that are then transposed upwards three times, resulting more in a 16-tone row that uses some repeated notes.  The outer movements are a theme and variations (the latter title being written in reverse indicating a retrograde exploration) with a central allegro that is far more traditional in its gestures than one might expect.  Such though is often the case with those who try their hand at serialism and choose this as a base and departure point to allow better dramatic feel and flow.  I suspect the music gets this feel as well with the inclusion of the same note a couple of times in the “row”.  This is an engaging quartet that has a seeming underlying wit at times as well as bit of joy in the often resulting gorgeous lyrical lines that pop out.  The final piece on the album is a setting of an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, Love Is Not All (1959) performed by Williams and Lehrman from an earlier Capstone release.

  The compilation here brings together the music of two friends whose music tends to lie in contrast to one another as presented here.  Lehrman’s work has a theatrical sense of drama (mind you this has a lot to do with these mostly being text-settings) but with a sensibility of folk music.  The orchestral writing is akin to contemporary Soviet and Russian styles with this coming more from a Shchedrin and Shostakovich school of thought.  Mandelbaum’s music spans across a larger time frame and one might see some of the shifts in his style over time.  There is always a fascinating sense of line and gorgeous harmonic qualities that are extensions of mid-century American art music but quite unique expressions here.  This is then a fascinating collection of mostly 20^th-Century American music that should be a delightful surprise for those discovering the work of these two composers.

   

   

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