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Ives and Britten: Voices:  NEC Contemporary Ensemble, Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, Gainesborough St, Boston 10.2.2009 (KH)

Ives Songs (I)
“Slow March”
“Charlie Rutledge”
“The Things Our Fathers Loved”
“General William Booth Enters Into Heaven”
“Autumn”
“He Is There”

Andrew Wannigman, baritone
Yoko Kida, piano
Thomas J. Wible, flute

Ives Songs (II)

“Two Little Flowers”
“Memories (A. Very Pleasant; B. Rather Sad)”
“The Side Show”
“The Greatest Man”
“The Children’s Hour”
“West London”

Nicole Rodin, mezzo-soprano
Ekiko Akahori, piano

Britten

Serenade, Opus 31 for tenor, horn & strings, Owen McIntosh, tenor, Andrew Mee, horn, Nathan Lofton, conductor


At times when my ears have stumbled in the Cloud of Misdoubting Ives as a composer, it has been his Puckish songs which dispelled the murk with a shining light.  These songs aren’t really contemporary (as director John Heiss conceded in his introductory remarks), but they do strain artistically against their own proper time.  The dozen songs, presented in turn by baritone Andrew Wannigman and mezzo-soprano Nicole Rodin, had a craggy, codgerly spiritedness, and both singers lived largely into them.  In entirely a good way, they are stagey;  and a program of Ives songs is to be commended as an antidote to your workaday stand-&-deliver Lieder recital.  Of the two singers, Ms Rodin had perhaps the advantage in energy, and also in musical command (Ms Kida had at times a tendency to overpower Mr Wannigman — and after all, some of Ives’s accompaniments are essentially a mischievous pounding).  One excellently gauged ‘music-hall’ touch was:  Ms Rodin and tenor Owen McIntosh arose and joined Mr Wannigman in succeeding verses of “He Is There.”  Not having seen the score, for all I know this accumulated chorus was only (and just) what Ives directed;  it was one of his delights to flout convention, as Mr Wible’s flute demonstrated, by coming to a halt only a few notes after the singers and piano did.

Considering all the twists and turns through which irony in music would course in the 20^th century, it is worth noting that Ives makes his musical point in songs such as “He Is There” and “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” not by opposition, but by laying things on rather thick.  In Jordan Hall tonight, I wondered if this aspect of the songs was lost on the audience, some of whom cheerily joined in on the hip hip hoorays;  but perhaps that what musicologists are for (and I know a few). [At the intermission I overheard a student quip to his fellows, “New England Conservatory? It should be Ives Conservatory.”  This is only speculation on my part, of course, but I dare say there may be a lot of Ives in the air these days at the corner of Huntington and Gainesborough.]

Enjoyable as the Ives sets were (as both programming and performances), the pièce de résistance of the concert was undeniably the Britten.  Owen McIntosh prepared for the piece not merely as an adornment to his repertory, but clearly with a will to mastery.  All the elements were there in the score:  the varied and richly tinted texts, and music of piercing clarity - Britten’s modernism consisted less in throwing over the Victorian tradition, and more in paring it down to essentials, a music of nervy agility, and often of an intense simplicity;  with the able support of a string ensemble sensitively directed by Nathan Lofton.  Mr McIntosh fixed the hall with a glittering eye, and created the piece with such authority that one might almost believe the Serenade had been written for him.  Andrew Mee delivered the horn part with intrepid assurance, and it is a part which requires both agility and accurate placement throughout the range of a notoriously beastly instrument.

I  noted with regret that the piece which was to open the program, the Boston première of John Greer’s song cycle The Red Red Heart had to be canceled because of the sudden indisposition of the singer.

Karl Henning

Dr. Karl Henning is a clarinettist  and composer based in Boston, Mass.

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