CONTENTSCONTRIBUTOR BIOS: Evan Hause, 3 LIVE EVENTS
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Finding the Music in the Metrics BLC Frank Retzel: Summer Songs (1995); Landscapes (2002); Reflections (2002) ~~ Music by Ravel, Falla, Rachmaninoff and Massenet. Pamela Myers (soprano); Diego Tornelli (piano). Bruno Walter Auditorium, Lincoln Center. Jan. 30th. The last opportunity we had to cover an event here came on one of those Saturday afternoons when a host of shoppers would pile in with large noisy bags and a thoroughly unmusical attitude toward the proceedings. Hopefully, with some scheduling changes now in effect, more empathetic audiences will be once again attracted to this once favored and generally available venue. With our own Frank Retzel having just written some piano pieces and songs, the BWA served as an acceptable testing ground, despite the rather dry acoustical setting. On this Thursday evening with its 6 p.m. start, Ms. Myers and Mr. Tornelli repeated a performance of Retzel’s Summer Songs (reviewed by de Clef Pineiro, NMC, Summer 2002) after the intermission. (The time space between a group of 19th century potboilers and the contemporary works made sense here, and we can see what troubled de Clef Pineiro in his earlier review in which he reported that Retzel’s songs were foolishly sandwiched into a program of classical pieces.) Our take on Retzel’s songs is that the composer comes across as a respectful, sometimes cautious setter of poetic thoughts, but mostly he’s not afraid to add his own ideas to the "reading." In "The Poplar," a setting of a four-liner by the notoriously "uncollaborative" Seamus Heaney, phrases like "bright scale" and "needle quivering" invite effective piano passages to underscore the grim vocal part. And, as de Clef Piñeiro points out in his review (discussing all six songs), Mr. Retzel challenges the poet’s intentions by shifting "The Poplar’s" words into a triplet rhythm, something Mr. Heaney probably would bristle at. But then to chase the blues, so to speak, Retzel has fun with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Colors and Rhymes," a playful and metrically delicious concoction of images of wood and bark (e.g., "Wood of oak for yoke and barnbeam, Wood of hornbeam"). The composer’s grouping, ending with a vocalise, also tells a bit about his own impulses, which tend toward an artful focus within the variety. With the setting of two poems by John Hollander in Reflections, Frank Retzel may have found his artistic soulmate. This poet’s complex thoughts are often crunched into simple words which match the composer’s conciseness to a tee. "Beach Whispers," which logically follows "Dunes" (a piano piece) sports lines like What they could be said to say About the neap and spring Of tides and even more About how to uncover The order of all this. Despite a characteristically hard to follow diction and occasional loss of line in the lower tones, Pamela Myers was a sympathetic ally of Retzel’s aims. In the vocal works sung before the intermission, she showed off the voluptuous temperament of the Latin and Gypsy cultures in the Ravel, Falla and Massenet, while her outrightly dramatic sensibilities commanded the stage in her readings of three dramatic songs by the operatically frustrated Sergei Rachmaninoff, all of these sung in their original languages. We only wish we had translations of the texts in order to better feel the obvious power in those French, Spanish and Russian words. No dice. The Bruno Walter foots the bill for programs, but liner notes are generally discouraged. No fair! Diego Tornelli, while a bit mannered in his technique and somewhat slow to find the right palette required by the singer, showed he has the stuff to offer something more than serviceable accompaniment. One only wishes he had kept the piano lid either closed or modestly ajar, so as not to give the impression he was competing with sung words and had to win at all cost. On the other hand, his readings of Retzel’s Landscapes and "Dunes" from Reflections were his best efforts -- moody and very insightful. |