Preach Sister Preach: New Vocal Works
Katherine Jolly, soprano.  Emily Yap Chua, piano
Christa Cole, violin; Rachel Mossburg, viola;
Samantha Johnson-Helms, clarinet; Per Bjorkling, double bass/Joshua Harper
Navona Records 6244
Total Time:  41:14
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Soprano Katherine Jolly performs three new works for voice on this collection from Navona.  Two of the works are song cycles and they are separated by a single, longer work by Minneapolis native Katherine Bodor.

Evan Williams explores the poetry of Emily Dickinson for Emily’s House.  The ten poems set here explore the many moods of the poet who lived in relative seclusion at her home in Amherst, MA.  Here, Williams explores how the poet’s words are part of her own interior life as she tries to grapple with themes of love and loss, joy and pain.  The main focus beyond the text is Jolly’s performance which allows her to demonstrate her range and nuance of mood.  The music is a blend of modern harmonic approaches with the vocal line mostly stating the text in its own musical line that may be picked up on and elaboratdd by the piano.  Chua’s support is also quite telling here with delicate playing that helps connect with this more interior dialogue.  This can lead to some rather intense musical interludes.

Bodor’s work tackles our inability to rise and take action to address climate change.  Her text is taken from a New York Magazine article by David Wallace-Wells, often referred to as a climate alarmist.  His bleak predictions form the text of Absent an Adjustment which forces us to confront these issues head on.  The piece is set for a chamber ensemble and voice.  It allows for a slow build of sound that has a more acerbic lyricism with dissonant repeated harmonies that ebb and flow as the work opens.  A clarinet line grows out of the voice’s music as well which is a rather interesting effect against the dramatic accompaniment.  This is a more intense piece that heightens the insistence of the text with punctuations from the ensemble increasingly moving to more dissonant arrival points.  At one point, it is almost as if the voice has exhausted itself by trying to warn us of the path ahead.

The final work is a collection of quotes by a diverse group of women, many of them notable contemporary comedians.  Evan Mack has taken these brief quotes and crafted a collection of musical statements around each hinting at the different speaker’s era, or some additional extramusical reference that could bring cohesion to the music.  Fourteen brief pieces are like pointillist musical enhancements to these often humorous, and yet often thought-provoking comments.  The music shifts well through various styles as well which explore blues and perhaps a little musical theater feel along the way.  This lends some of the music a more accessible quality.  That does not mean that there are not more unusual melodic constructs, but it does allow for some often fascinating music.

Contemporary art song is something that deserves more attention and these three different approaches to the genre provide listeners with new ways that composers use this traditional chamber music today.  Really, the album is a demonstration disc for Jolly’s talent which is on great display here.  Balance between her and the piano is superb giving us a realistic sound picture to also reflect on the texts and their musical accompaniments in this interesting new release.

Bond: Instruments of Revelation
Chicago Pro Musica
Rufus Muller, tenor. Jenny Lin, piano.
Olga Vinokur,piano.
Naxos 8.559864
Total Time:  62:07
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

This new Naxos release allows listeners to explore some of Victoria Bond’s (b. 1945) more intimate works composed in the first decade of the new century.  Bond studied composition with Ingolf Dahl and Roger Sessions and early in her career assisted on some of Paul Glass’s film scores.  Some may know her from her Metropolitan Opera lectures.  There are four pieces on this album which includes two works for chamber ensemble, a work for tenor and piano, and a piano piece.

The two chamber pieces open the album featuring musicians of Chicago Pro Musica.  Instruments of Revelation (2010), from which the album takes its title, is a musical depiction of three Tarot cards.  “The Magician” opens with a rather appropriately mysterious quality that shifts between some faster slights-of-hand.  The central “The High Priestess” has a fascinating blend of semi-Impressionist ambiguity with repeating lyric lines that have a semi-Eastern quality.  All ends with a blend of intensity and wit for “The Fool”.  The music is a blend of accessible tonal language which may descend into more dissonant ideas and eventually even some more experimental techniques by the final movement.  The ancient city of Pompeii serves as the inspiration for the second chamber work, Frescoes and Ash (2009).  In this equally descriptive work, Bond moves us through a variety of scenes from street musicians, to comedic actors, to a visit to the Sybil, a glance in on Chiron teaching Achilles, and more.  The final movement is a reflection of death casting what has been heard as a calm acceptance of the inevitable.  Throughout, Bond’s ability to craft descriptive musical scenes serves for an engaging work that is equally dramatic with a post-modern classicism.

Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming (2011) is an exploration of a section from James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Rufus Muller, who premiered the work, performs it here.  The lengthy setting takes us through a variety of factual information as the character faces the death of his infant son.  The seemingly random aspects of the text invite the listener to also make some of the intellectual connections Joyce requires.  Here Bond interprets this as moments of silence which add to the dramatic tension in the music.  The soloist both sings some rather gorgeous lines but there are also straight moments of narration that are spoken to guide the listener.  Texts are provided to help aid the listener who wishes to follow this more closely.  The accompaniment here tends to provide both a melodic support to the voice as well as adding some of the connective tissue to create a sense of foreboding or other dramatic inference.  There are plenty of stunningly beautiful moments as the piece nears its final pages.

Finally, the album closes with Binary (2005) for piano.  Bond explores how one might interpret this concept more familiar perhaps to those in computer science where “0” and “1” are the underlying components of everything.  The two sections of the work tackle this in unique ways.  In the first movement, Bond sets up large block chords against single melodic lines all based on the interval of a second.  This is a strikingly visceral work that leans more towards a Bartokian dissonance.  The concluding movement then shifts to explore this concept as rhythm using a Brazilian samba as a structural device for a set of variations.  The music tends to be a bit more tonal with the rhythmic component working best to drive it forward.

The performances here serve the music quite well with some exquisite playing by the Chicago Pro Musica that help Bond’s often beautiful lyricism shine.  Articulation and attention to detail also help set up her crisp rhythmic ideas quite well.  There is good variety in this release which provides some appeal for those interested in chamber music, song cycles, or works for piano.  But really, it lends itself to an exploration of Bond’s more intimate writing for these forces and her sense of dramatic shape to her thematic inspirations for these works.