September 1, 2009: Viola: solo & obbligato

The last time pianist Hillary Nordwell, violist Alexa Beattie, and soprano Ann Moss gave a Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, they divided the program between a song recital by Moss and a viola sonata by Beattie.  This time they performed as a more integrated group with song settings by Vartan Aghababian, two from 1988 and two from 2001.  Unless I am mistaken (which can happen where new compositions are concerned), these were the same songs that they presented at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music when Beattie gave her Certificate Recital last May, in which case they were certainly worth hearing again (which, as I have said before, is the best thing that can happen to unfamiliar new works of music).  Aghababian seems to have a preference for the texts of highly reflective poets.  The two poets familiar to me, Richard Wilbur and Villiers de l'Isle Adam (also set by Gabriel Fauré), were selected for his 2001 set.  The poets of the 1988 set were new to me but interesting enough to whet my appetite.  Jones Very was a nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist whose poetic descriptions of nature provide an excellent complement to the prose of Henry David Thoreau (whose texts were set in a radically different way by John Cage).  The other poet, Rachel Field, received more recognition for her fiction for both young adults and grown-ups (All This and Heaven Too);  and, in the domain of classical music trivia, she wrote the English lyrics for the version of Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" used in the Disney film Fantasia.

All four of the texts that Aghababian selected speak from the heart and to the heart.  His use of obbligato viola to complement the soprano voice line highlights the expressiveness of the text without undue emphasis.  We may assume that Beattie and Moss have been working together on this material for at least half a year, and they have homed in on the intimacy of that expressiveness.  Moss further contributed to the mix with minimal physical dramatic expression, which also served to highlight without emphasis.  This is the kind of setting that enhances our appreciation for poetry, particularly when the poems are unfamiliar.

The genre also seems to have appealed to Jake Heggie, who is building up an impressive repertoire in the art song domain.  The same ensemble performed his setting of "My True Love Hath My Heart," by Sir Philip Sidney, a poet decidedly different from those selected by Aghababian in many ways.  Nevertheless, Heggie, too, understood the rhetorical relationship that could be established between viola and voice.  What he did not grasp quite as strongly was Sidney's idiosyncratic approach to syntax and the impact of that syntax on the differentiation between the embellishing and the embellished in the text.  However, this was a minor flaw, for which Moss' dramatic intuitions provided adequate compensation.

Both Moss and Beattie also took their own solo turns.  Moss sang four Aghababian settings of poems from When We Were Very Young by Alan Alexander Milne (better known as A. A. Milne, the creator of the stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, known more formally as "Edward Bear" and first introduced to readers of all ages as "Winnie-ther-Pooh").  Aghababian set these Milne texts in 2002, perhaps because he felt that, having plumbed the depths of the human heart, he could take on a bit of whimsy, which best described three of the settings:  "The Christening" (of a dormouse), "Lines and Squares" (and more menacing bears), and "Spring Morning."  The fourth poem, "The Mirror," was another reflection on nature, capturing impressions similar to those of Very in far less than half as many words.  Moss had no trouble delivering the whimsical in her performance, again with a minimum of physical motion judiciously applied.

Beattie's solo performance turned back to the nineteenth century for Robert Schumann's Märchenbilder, composed in 1851.  This was a relatively prolific year for Schumann, since it included his first two violin sonatas, the revision of his fourth symphony, and his final piano trio.  This suite of four fairy-tale images perfectly complemented the rest of the program, since they were composed very much in the spirit of the songs-without-words genre that Felix Mendelssohn pursued so extensively in his piano music.  In spite of the title of the suite, no explicit fairy tales are cited.  Each composition is identified only by an expressive tempo marking:  Nicht schnell (D minor), Lebhaft (F major), Rasch (D minor), and Langsam, mit melancholischen Ausdruck (D major).  The overall structure verges on the bipolar, proceeding from and D minor moodiness to a livelier pace that eventually returns to a manic D minor, then falling back on that depressive "melancholischen Ausdruck."  Like Moss, Beattie had a feel for the dramatic progress of this cycle, effectively conveying both the depressive and the manic without giving in to excess.  Schumann may have been the only nineteenth-century composer on the program;  but his spirit was certainly at home with the contemporary composers of the vocal offerings.