Carpentersville – online review

Carpentersville

JS Bach St Matthew Passion – Ebarme dich (arr S Barber) Bernstein Arias and Barcarolles – Greeting. Peter Pan – Dream with me. Wonderful Town – 100 easy ways to lose a man (arr K Amos) Blitzstein Regina – Best thing of all. Juno – I wish it so (both arr Amos) Brourmann Make me a Kite (arr Amos) Guettel The Light in the Piazza – Margaret: The Beauty Is (arr J Kelly) McBroom Errol Flynn (arr Amos) Silberman Martha Wallace Hopper’s Wife – Lazy summer days Wallis Dinghy Song (arr Amos)

Lucy Schaufer mez Various artists / Kevin Amos (Buy from Amazon)

If Audra McDonald made more solo albums, she probably would have arrived at the territory inhabited by ‘Carpentersville’. But her albums tend to look forward to recently written music, while Lucy Schaufer takes more of a loving, backward glance at music she associates with her Midwestern-Illinois upbringing, thus becoming perhaps the first singer in history to follow Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway showstopper ‘100 easy ways to lose a man’ with ‘Erbarme dich’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

Is there a problem with that? Strangely not, if only because mezzo-soprano Schaufer has the pipes for everything, honouring her operatic training but finding the flexibility of expression needed for Broadway, and seems a bit more alive with Bernstein than with Bach (which is a bit monochrome). Also, musical barriers tend to be in the brain of the beholder. And smalltown Illinois – speaking from my experience – is a place where one's musical sensibility is shaped by whatever happens to turn up at the public library. Bach, Bernstein and Blitzstein can easily become one’s ‘three Bs’, even if the music originates from less-than-successful properties such as Broadway’s Juno (the case with Blitzstein’s ‘I wish it so’.) Because Schaufer is at home with this range of material, so is the listener.

Schaufer’s ‘Carpentersville’ is defined by priorities that perhaps aren’t terribly different from many other small towns. Parental affection warrants a bit of sentimentality in the song ‘Errol Flynn’, Amanda McBroom’s compassionate portrait of the unfulfilled life of actor David Bruce, her father. So does birth, as in Bernstein’s lovely ‘Greeting’ from his late-period song-cycle Arias and Barcarolles. And then there’s sex, which has to be handled discreetly since secrets are hard to keep in small towns.

But that’s the one place I part company with Schaufer – ‘The Dinghy Song’ by one Ruth Wallis, a now-little-known post-war American entertainer whose sexual double entendres seem quaint in this post-Bette Midler age. Schaufer’s delivery keeps telegraphing the message, ‘You’re going to love this next line’, and if you're feeling ornery, you’ll rebel on principle. Aside from that, I have to admit that I love Lucy.

David Patrick Stearns

Click here to read a session report from the recording sessions of 'Carpentersville'

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