WOODSTOCK – The American SongFest was a three-star
constellation, constant in that the seething nebulae of theatrical and
musical experiment comprising the WOODSTOCK FRINGE FESTIVAL celebrated
at the Byrdcliffe Theater through the final weeks of August.
The triple concert series, innovative in the greater
Hudson valley’s rich musical landscape, was conceived by artistic
director Larry Alan Smith and featured Larry Thomas Bell as official
composer-in-residence.
Bell shared the stage fro the keyboard with a collective
of instrumentalists and singers, all gifted at tale-telling, in
compositions with and without words. Performances included works by
Vincent Persichetti, William Grant Still, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and
collections of Bell’s own songs set to poems by Emily Dickinson, William
Blake and four of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
WRITING a necessarily succinct review piece, the impulse
to flash the credentials of the extraordinary artists involved in these
performances almost takes precedence over the desire to share the bless
generated by them for a community that has enjoyed the passage of elite
bands of classical musicians over decades and tends to be snobbish about
new folks in new forums.
For pedigree, know that Bell, who studied composition at
Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions, currently
professes the same creative discipline at the New England Conservatory.
He has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation awards and won the
Rome Prize as well as the Charles Ives Award from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters.
SYMPHONIES of Rome, Spain, Bulgaria, Boston, New York and
other locales play Bell’s orchestral works, and the legendary Juilliard
Quartet premiered his first string quartet, written at age 21. We
personally yearn to hear Bell’s piano trio, “Mahler in Blue Light,”
recently performed live on the World Wide Web, let us know this composer
by the animate grace of his music.
SONGFEST’S opening concert titled “Lessons Learned,”
featured four parables by Persichetti variously set for solo piano,
oboe, flute and bassoon and executed by the Fringe’s official chamber
players, including Bell, James Austin Smith and Elisheva Margulies.
Smith, a weaving, stand-up piper in the tradition of Pan
(oboe soloist Humbert Lucarelli is among his mentors) stepped in with
English horn to play “Parable IV” for bassoonist Sam Banks still
traveling in from Chicago.
We caught Banks at the concluding concert in a
performance of Still’s “Vingettes,” six chatty pieces for oboe, bassoon
and piano drawing on the international folkloric incidents – this sounds
so pompous, the pieces are much fun – and decided the bassoon, talking
horn as it is in his hands, should replace the saxophone in all jazz
ballads. The sheer beauty of Bank’s tone is its own seduction.
WHILE we’re ahead of sequential things and on this Still
piece, it was wondrous to observe Smith senior, father to the oboist as
well as artistic director of the festival and former dean of Hartt
School of Music where he currently teaches composition (as he was once
taught by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Persichetti at Juilliard), chase
and cherish the geist of these mini-marvelous tone poems with the winds
from the keyboard. One sees in a flash the tenderness and immediacy of
the artist underlying all acts of composition, administration, etc.
Back to Bell, who similarly revealed the beatific nature
of his creative beast playing the first Persichetti parable, XIX. This
man has a mystic keyboard touch, eliciting tone from the piano like a
therimin player who never actually fingers his instrument. The
evocative grace in his execution illuminates affinity beyond respect for
his mentor, reflecting a bond of kindred spirits.
Neither composer trades on angst and dread through
atonality – their work hovers in harmonic spheres of psyche.
Mezzo-soprano D’Anna Fortunato joined Bell in four
Persichetti settings of Dickinson poems. Expansive, whimsical scoring
send up the poet’s sentiments, not eh composer’s projections, a gift, a
restraint, an instinct shared in Bell’s “Songs of Time and Enternity”
set to starker Dickinson poems.
COMPOSED in 2002 and premiered at this Byrdcliffe venue,
these timeless songs may carry to eternity, partly by fusion of musical
score to text and greatly because Fortunato was their vocal interpreter.
Credits of this diva and teacher with no diva’s
projection except to incarnate each song run two pages. Forget about
them. Know her by a vocal resonance, cello pure and deep, that induces
tears separate from sentiment and preceding passion, drawing the
listener into the truest passion of each phrase.
FORTUNATO made glory rise to high heaven in Bell’s “Take
the Name of Jesus with You” based on a scared song by Lydia Baxter –
another potential eternal in the lexicon of American song – an was the
vulnerable, impassioned receiver of letters from Beethoven in Bell’s
three songs based on Beethoven’s correspondence with his “Immortal
Beloved.”
This is a powerful and thrilling cycle, operatic in
reach, that on a Saturday afternoon at Byrdcliffe passed by an American
song crowd unfamiliar with this great love story in Beethoven’s life.
At SongFest II, soprano Catherine Thorpe joined Bell to
perform his “Ten Poems of William Blake” set to “Songs of Innocence” and
“Songs of Experience.”
OUR receptivity was handicapped by echoes of Vaughn
Williams’ compositions for soprano and oboe on the “Innocence” texts
colliding with this new scoring, also by Thorpe’s slight discomfort in
expressing the mystic, transparent sentiments of text at a high
tessitura that wasn’t quite sung in.
Vocal tension dissolved to the quick-silver sound this
singing actress is noted for in a collection of arias from operas by
American composers, including Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe,”
William Schuman’s “The Mighty Casey,” Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” and
Bernstein’s “Candide.”
In the nature of revelation, Bell played his own trip of
preludes and fugues for piano titled “reminiscences and Reflections” at
the commencement of this concert with a less reverential approach than
he brought to his Persichetti solo.
The achieved cumulative splendor, nonetheless.
SONGFEST concluded in high form with Thorpe and Bell’s
collaborations in Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s romantic scoring of
Shakespeare’s “Under the Greenwood Tree,” “Winter Wind” and texts from
“As You Like It” and a premiere performance of Bell’s enhancement of
four of the Bard’s sonnets, including a profound take on “When, in
Disgrace with Fortune in Men’s Eyes.”
Flautist Margulies played Still’s “Summerland” as ambient
soundscape, and the afore-celebrated trip of two Smiths and only one
Banks delighted and awed with their animate sync in Still’s “Vingettes.”
