The cover picture is
deceptive. Albany have shown strong
commitment to song composer Lori Laitman
– whose Mystery is also reviewed
on this site – and that is very
much the case with this release. Documentation
is excellent; there are full texts,
and notes regarding the compositions
from the composer. Thankfully the recording
level and balance are just and the performances
are clearly committed though, it must
be said, uneven. One of these songs
– the setting of Emily Dickinson’s If
I ... from the Four Dickinson
Songs cycle of 1996 has been recorded
before on Gasparo GSCD 360, an album
of Dickinson settings and sung there
by Virginia Dupuy review.
It shows that Laitman is gaining ground
in American art song performance. That
is a reflection of her intimate appreciation
of Dickinson’s songs – talismanic though
the poet may be for American song composers,
from Copland down, it nevertheless takes
an acute ear for psychological and musical
balance to set her. In that respect
it can fairly be said that Laitman understands
the hermetic as much as she does the
wild in Dickinson’s writing. And she
sets her with vivid imagination.
The cycle Men with
Small Heads to the poems of Thomas
Lux sounds rather whimsical but she
strikes a more impressionist stance
in Sunrise from Sunflowers,
a 1999 setting. The heart of the collection
however is Holocaust 1944, seven
poems set for baritone and double bassist
– here Gary Karr for whom the work was
written. The texts and sonorities evoke
considerably darker resonances than
another cycle dealing with the Holocaust,
I Never Saw Another Butterfly,
which is on the companion Albany disc.
The bass keens, bearing much of the
emotive weight of the settings, and
is called upon to employ considerable
reserves of technique and expression;
not least in the folk-like moments that
give added poignancy. There’s some Scherzo
relief provided by What Luck,
the fourth of the seven. In the final
poem, the one that gives the cycle its
title, the power is built up through
cumulative repetition, the lyrical reminiscences
being that much more moving as a result.
Lest I give the impression
that it’s all doom and gloom; it’s not.
A number of the cycles are light and
airy and we have examples of her more
frivolous side (Plums) and the
song that gives this disc its title,
Laitman’s own Dreaming. This
is a hilarious encore piece – Felicity
Lott should get to hear of it without
delay and she’ll need to rope in Thomas
Allen. It makes for a witty envoi to
a well-planned and rewarding disc.
Jonathan Woolf
.
ALBANY RECORDS TROY 570 [79.21]
