Margaret Brouwer (b. 1940)
Reactions - Songs and Chamber Music
Rhapsodic Sonata (2011, rev. 2016)
Declaration (2005)
I Cry – Summer 2020 (2020)
The Lake (2019)
All Lines Are Still Busy (2019)
Sarah Beaty (mezzo-soprano), Brian Skoog (tenor)
Eliesha Nelson (viola), Shuai Wang (piano), Mari Sato (violin)
rec. 2021, various locations
Sung texts are included in the booklet and can also be accessed online
Reviewed as download from press preview
NAXOS 8.559904 [56]
Margaret Brouwer, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, has been known as composer and composition teacher – and founder of the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group. She has no family relations with Leo Brouwer, who is a great name in guitar circles. He is Cuban, but almost contemporaneous with Margaret. For me the present disc was my first encounter with her music, and it whetted the appetite for more. The compositions here cover roughly the last fifteen years, and the last three are very recent.
The common denominator of this album is “Reactions”, and Margaret Brouwer says in her liner notes: “The works on this recording are musical representations of reactions to various events.” The Rhapsodic Sonata (2011, rev. 2016) is a reaction to being in love. It is full of happiness and joy, total harmony but also confrontations. As in all the works here the melodic material is very much in the foreground, but her harmonic language can be knotty, brave dissonances contrast with lush melodies. The first movement in the Sonata – Cáritas – is, to my mind, a combat between two conflicting feelings. The music is rhythmic and aggressive, the piano employed as a percussion instrument and spiced with dissonances, but the viola, the symbol for love, often takes command with its warm tone. The mood changes frequently, the music breaths humour, and occasionally anger, but it is full of life. It certainly is rhapsodic. The second movement, … fair as the moon, bright as the sun … is achingly beautiful with long melodious arches. It is the viola – love – that dominates. Occasionally the piano inserts a powerful chord that breaks the spell, but love soon reigns again. The third movement, titled Blithesome Spirit, is again rhythmic, staccato, contrapuntal in a thrilling and joyful conversation, where the viola relates to the love music in the previous movement. The piano on its own gets the last word, saying, I believe, “Yes, I do!” I have already returned to the sonata thrice and it has haunted me ever since. Both Eliesha Nelson and Shuai Wang do a good job and Ms Wang is a pillar of strength throughout the programme.
Declaration, the earliest work here, composed in 2005, is a song-cycle set for mezzo-soprano, violin and piano. The over-riding theme is war, violence and human rights, and though original inspiration came from the last song, poems by David Adams, who wrote them in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, they feel even more relevant today, considering what is happening around us this very day. The calm, simple, melodious Thorn, to a text by Ann Woodward, deals with people who believe that the TV news reports on wars are just fiction. The word “fake news” wasn’t invented yet seventeen years ago. Margaret Brouwer’s own text Scattering in Fear is a frightening picture of all those innocent civilians killed in genocides. It happened in former Yugoslavia in the 90s, it happens in Ukraine now:
Remember children, babes and mothers/you slaughtered that day./ Silence yourself – /Silence yourself – /and remember them.
The desperation, the sorrow is graphically depicted – and the restrained anger towards the perpetrators. The third song, … men and women are … is of course Thomas Jefferson’s words from The Declaration of Independence, with the important addition “and women”. Jefferson only wrote “men”. Whom do you call angel now? is a very beautiful song of mourning. It is deeply gripping and universally applicable, not only for the victims of the terror attack in New York. Sarah Beaty is deeply engaged and expressive. In the first song she is rather shaky but grows in stature throughout the cycle.
The Covid 19 pandemic, which paralysed a whole world – and we haven’t fully recovered yet – has also resulted in artistic and musical fingerprints. The isolation, the loneliness, paralysed lots of normally active people but others transformed the paralysation to creative zest. Margaret Brouwer composed the little I Cry – Summer 2020, as a lamentation over the loneliness that overcame her. What she found in her loneliness was beauty. The violin – Mari Sato’s playing is lovely, as it is in the rest of her work on this disc – sings melodiously, to begin with over a Moonlight Sonata accompaniment. A lament it certainly is, but it needn’t be sorrowful.
The Lake from 2019 is a reaction, occasioned by a peaceful stroll around a lake. It is an idyll, birds are singing, and the water is glittering, everything is beautiful… But what is that? Something on the water. Green… And that smell? Fish, dead fish. And algae on the water. The idyll is broken. Pollution I want to go back. I don’t want to see it.
Another of our fundamental problems – the environment – depicted in music. Margaret Brouwer is certainly engaged in the global situation. The music in this song – or perhaps scene is a better word – is beautiful, often sung melismatic. But when the opposite side of the coin appears, it becomes heated, dramatic, frightened. Brian Skoog is an excellent singer, sonorous, soft voice but with some metal in it when needed.
All Lines Are Still Busy is a humorous monologue dealing with another great contemporary problem: how to get in touch with a human being, when all lines are busy. Mari Sato speaks and plays her violin, and I believe everyone, who has once tried to call a company with a switchboard, will recognise the situation. After all the serious reactions in this programme, this amusing encore comes as a kind of relief. But all the problems we have encountered have been solidly etched into our minds.
From the above readers should be able to conclude that this disc contains very accessible music from the 21st century, music with a message moreover, and it is performed with great commitment.
Göran Forsling
