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REVIEW: A Glittering MNSong Showcase (Source Song Festival)

by Basil Considine -

A file photo of a Source Song Festival event at Westminster Hall in Minneapolis.

Once upon a time, a certain CEO of Target said that the combination of low cost-of-living and wealth of arts and lifestyle offerings in the Twin Cities was one of Minnesota’s best-kept secrets. Thanks to the Internet (and a lot of word-of-mouth), that’s no longer a secret – but the annual Source Song Festival is one of those glittering offerings in the region’s artistic crown.

The makeup of festival offerings has grown and morphed over the years, but the MNSong Showcase is one of its stellar features: the world premiere of new song cycles (broadly conceived) commissioned and nurtured by the festival team over a period of two years. On Thursday night, audiences at Westminster Presbyterian in Minneapolis were treated to a trio of new musical gems.

The program – part of the 13th Source Song Festival – opened by honoring Barry Kempton, who stepped down this summer after a decade and a half of leading the Schubert Club as both Artistic and Executive Director, during which the organization commissioned more than four dozen new musical works.

Robert Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, Op. 42, the starting place from which one of the MNSong commissions began, was composed in a whirlwind of writing on July 11 and 12, 1840 – two months before Robert married the pianist Clara Wieck. The original composer’s manuscript (cross-outs, changes, and all) can be viewed online.

Love and Live (Kirsten Baum, adapter and composer)

The music kicked off with Kristen Baum’s Love and Life, which reimagines Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben song cycle using a razor blade approach to the original music and translated text, interwoven with new material to highlight the protagonist’s voice. Presented with an ingenious companion booklet to graphically illustrate part of its process, the new song cycle began with the haunting “Help Me”, gorgeously rendered by soprano Shari Feldman and pianist Casey Rafu. The fusion requires no prior knowledge of Schumann’s original, but to the avid listener the motives from the source score are cleverly interwoven and underscored to new emotional affects.

Los Angeles, CA-based composer Kristen Baum.

The second song, the miniature “You Have Caused Me Pain”, opens brashly with its title plaint, after which the piano slips into beautiful introspection – one of many passages in the cycle where the erasure of some of the preceding material makes room for new emotional exploration.

A change of mood slides smoothly into the ear with “Look at Me in Wonder”, the third song in the cycle, which is exactly what the program notes say: an expression of “her own needs, emotions, hopes, and dreams”. These threads are highlighted by sparse melodic lines and arpeggios, alternatively plaintive, moving, and optimistic.

The fourth song, “Grasp It, Believe It” seems to call out for an orchestration, with Rafu’s deft hands at the piano tracing out innumervale shades of the percussive pulse that drives through the piano. Feldman’s beautiful high A floated over the texture like a clarion call.

“On My Heart Delight”, the fifth song, is a study in emotional counterpoint. Whether hinting at the start of a fugue, or juxtaposing lines about happiness with a countermelody in the piano, or tracing out the beautifully rendered setting of the line “look at me and smile”, it invites a repeat listen.

“Wonderfully” – based on the second song in Frauenliebe und leben – takes on a new meaning as the basis for a reflective moment as the sixth song in Baum’s work. Lest one forget, the Schumanns’ courtship and marrigage did have its happy moments of marital bliss amdist their many downs. “What does it matter in its addition?” is a question that many couples ask, and several heads in the audience shared pregnant glances as Feldman’s clear and dulcet voice entwined the lyrics “Even if my heart break, break, O heart, what does it matter?”

The final song, “I Am Rising”, is a delightfully beautiful miniature to behold, and injected (to the audience’s pleasant surprise) with additional vocal harmonies by Clara Osowski and Caitlin Glastonbury.

Songs of Love and Loss (Samuel Mason)

San Francisco, CA-based composer Samuel Mason.

The next cycle on the program, Samuel Mason’s Songs of Love and Loss, comprises a set of five songs exploring grief.

Rendered by Javier Arrebola at the piano and mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, the cycle began with “Grief”, to a text by Barbara Crooker. Sparse in its aesthetic, the evocative lines resonated powerfully in Westminster Hall’s stellar yet intimate acoustic. At its most soulful, the marriage of text and music was filled with little moments that catch the ear and provoke self-reflection.

The second song, a setting of William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”, explores more of a Hugo Wolf-esque palette of sound, with a trace of 1950s Broadway woven into the vocal setting. This thoroughly enjoyable song with a delicious twist seems destined for inclusion in many song programs in years to come.

The third song, a setting of Minneapolis-based poet Raymond Luczak (b. 1965)’s “Later”, is more contemporary in its verbage, but Mason’s setting is thoroughly Schumannian to the ear. The line “Death’s a cruel interpreter”, intoned by Osowski to a tinselly treble chord on the piano, resounded powerfully in the hall.

Continuing the cycle is “Columbines”, a setting of R.H. Miller’s moving verses using gardening as a metaphor for the tribulations of losing a child. You could have heard a needle drop during Osowski’s sublime delivery of the lyric “Tinged with violet nestled in fringed green”, a moment matched only by the entrancing eddies from Mason’s score traced by Arrebola to “We are Here”.

The setting of James Joyce’s 1907 poem “Rain Has Fallen”, a pregnant miniature on its own, gains new weight with its setting as the final piece in this delightful song cycle. As a bookend to the larger work, it leaves the listener with an important musical-emotional finish to an evocative journey. Like many of the best song settings, it also makes the listener even more appreciative of the original poetry, having discovered new layers of meaning through the musical setting.

The text to Pennsylvania-based poet Barbara Crooker (b. 1945), one of the living writers whose works were integrated into the song cycle Songs of Love and Loss.

Accounts of a Lost World (Ben Morris, composer)

Kansas City, Missouri-based composer Ben Morris.

Following an intermission, the program resumed with Accounts of a Lost World, a nine-piece cantata featuring a vocal quartet and the period music ensemble Piffaro: The Renaissance Band. It is a far-reaching musical excursion through, amongst other thing, European explorers’ accounts of the Americas.

The first song, “The Land”, kicks off with a brassy declaration and soon segues into the uptempo “Plenty”, a lively piece that showcased many of the ensemble’s wide range of musical colors, notably the distinctive tones of Priscilla Herreid’s shawm. This portion of the musical score is infused with a sense of wonder that is particularly strong if one’s ears are not generally tuned to Renaissance instrumental ensembles.

The third number, the lively instrumental interlude “Recercada primera”, felt as rendered a somewhat anachronistic piece compared to the rest of the set. While otherwise pleasant to the ear, its integration of what seemed a modern rock groove with the period brass and woodwinds was as odd as the inclusion seemed superfluous.

Similar remarks could be made about the fourth piece, “Complaints”, another miniature whose raison d’être seems more completionist than functional; it is otherwise forgettable.

The fifth piece, “Gold, Silver, and Coal”, is a setting of some infamous public remarks from the American political sphere in recent years. It was both humorous and an apt pairing to the second piece, a contrast that would have seemed more logical without the interjection of the previous “Complaints”. The deliberately robotic sound to some of the vocal settings initially paired well with the dissonant score, but outstayed its welcome on its own.

“Not a Living Creature”, setting Bartolomé de las Casas’s scathing 1542 indictment of the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean, took the form of an evocative aria, gorgeously sung by Clara Osowski. The cleverly rendered economy of music was both powerful and impactful.

An engaging variety was showcased in the shifting score palette of “Disappeared”, the seventh piece in the set and one that would stand well on its own as an excerpt.

In contrast to the first instrumental interlude, “Recercada Segunda” is very much a pleasant neo-Renaissance composition that resets the palette, and would be a fine concert interlude in any number of programs.

The finale, “Expanse”, is something of a reprise and revisitation of the opening. A fine closing number, as its musical strains slipped away, a whispered “That was terrific” was heard in the hall.

The Source Song Festival continues today with a 2 PM master class on Finnish song by Javier Arrebola, and a recital of Hugo Wolf’s complete Italienisches Liederbuch at 7:30 PM. Both events take place at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis. 

Basil Considine
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