Le dernier cri de coeur
by Leonard Lehrman ©2008
“The Unquiet Heart: American Song Cycles.” • Ronald Perera: Sleep Now • Libby Larsen: Try Me, Good King • Stephen Paulus: Songs of Love and Longing • Bruce Adolphe: A Thousand Years of Love. Karen Smith EMERSON, soprano; Arlene Shrut, piano. Albany/Troy 909. Time: 72:03
The palate on Karen Smith Emerson’s second solo album is more limited, to just soprano and piano, but nonetheless diverse, especially in its composers’ choice of texts. (Her first album, “Songs of the Nightingale,” with Martin Katz, appeared on Centaur and included works of Milhaud, Britten, Sondheim, and John Duke, along with 19th-century composers.) Ronald Perera, a colleague at Smith College, chose poems by James Joyce; Libby Larsen the letters of the ill-fated wives of Henry VIII; Stephen Paulus’ seven Japanese poems translated by Sam Hamill; and Bruce Adolphe a panoply of 8, “after pouring [sic] over hundreds of poems from around the world,” beginning with a poem from Ninth century Japan, traversing through Shakespeare into Chinese, Italian, Rumi, French, Yiddish, and finally two of his own, the penultimate “Valley Girl in Love” being the cutest and most effective. The soprano lovingly immerses herself in all, bringing forth a cri de coeur when appropriate, and ending with a chuckle. In 1979, at Steinway, she sang the title role in concert excerpts from my opera Hannah, the same year she joined the Smith College faculty. That concert also included my “Songs of Birds.” Maybe there’ll be a sequel to her Nightingale album?
