After years of neglect by the big record companies, close on the heels of Susan Graham’s recital of Ned Rorem’s songs with piano accompaniment (Erato, 5/00) come these two CDs exploring his works for voice and orchestra. More Than a Day is a cycle of nine songs to poems by Jack Larson, divided into three sections. The first part consists of seven octets each beginning with the question, ‘Do I love you?’. The opening is joyful, with a soaring accompaniment as the poet affirms his love to be ‘more than a look’, but then as the sequence continues the mood gets darker as the orchestral colours become more complex. There is a piano adding a jazzy, disturbing element, but then an orchestral postlude seems to reaffirm the optimistic tone of the beginning.
The piano comes back in with whip-crack percussion in the second section, ‘My brain is littered’, where poet and composer contemplate the paraphernalia of illness and death. At the words, ‘Still I recall their flowered graves’, a tense tremolo in the strings leads to an almost operatic close that brings to mind one of Rorem’s best-known orchestral works, Eagles. But then the piano returns and leads the players away to a gentler mood, with flute and clarinet solos for the last song, ‘Oh love, see how the flowers mate’. Brian Asawa sings it all with courageous attack and full tone, displaying an impressive range for a countertenor in some of the low-lying phrases.
The brief cycle From an Unknown Past is one of Rorem’s earliest works, originally written for unaccompanied choir, then adapted for a solo voice and now orchestrated specially for Asawa. Scored for six winds and strings, the style is that of troubadour songs, appropriate for the mostly anonymous texts that lead to an extract from Dowland’s Third and Last Book of Songs – ‘Weep You No More, Sad Fountains’, and then Shakespeare’s ‘Crabbed Age and Youth’. Despite the European texts and the fact that, as Rorem reveals in his introduction, the songs were composed in Hyeres, the sound is unmistakably American. Why? It has something to do with that innocent optimism which, as Rorem once wrote, you only encounter in Americans. Between the two song-cycles comes Rorem’s Water Music, a concerto grosso from 1966 composed for violin and clarinet, with a brilliant accompaniment designed to show off the talents of the youth orchestra for which it was commissioned. It’s a set of variations on a theme called ‘Tune’ and subtitled Calm and sad. When the tune appears, it’s as lush as a Korngold film score, but only for a fleeting moment. The ensuing variations seem like a catalogue of bizarre encounters and experiences in which police sirens are evoked and storm clouds threaten. These three pieces, all played by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with virtuosic panache, make for a satisfyingly varied programme.
Like the concerto grosso, Sun was composed in 1966, and this cycle for soprano and orchestra was intended by Rorem as a companion piece to his earlier Poems of Love and the Rain. ‘The indicated need now seemed for songs of hate and the sun,’ he quips in the introductory note. The opening song, based on an ancient Egyptian text credited to King Ikhnaton (c 1360 BC) gives way to more modern musings on sunrises and sleepless nights, and copious sounds of ticking clocks. Rorem seems to have been going through a Russian phase when he composed this, the sonorities and rhythms suggest Stravinsky and Prokofiev. In his book The Final Diary (now re-titled The Later Diaries, since there have been others since), Rorem writes that the orchestra for Sun should be ‘like gossamer’ while the soprano soars to ‘unnatural stratospheres’. It is a magnificent, large-scale enterprise to which those high sopranos who for years have made do with Strauss’s Four Last Songs should look. Lauren Flanigan, who is fast becoming America’s new prima donna, delivers it all with considerable aplomb.
Rorem’s Third String Quartet completes the CD. This is a much later work (1990) in five movements and, unusually for Rorem, who often refers to the ‘serial killers’, it opens with a movement based on a 12-note row. But, he insists, it’s a motive and not a row in the Schoenbergian sense. From this teasingly dissonant opening develops a luxuriously tuneful second movement called ‘Scherzo-Sarabande-Scherzo’. This is the most obviously ‘difficult’ music on either of these discs, and Rorem seems aware of that as he provides a detailed programme for it, writing about torrents and whirling dervishes. The two CDs provide a portrait of one of the most consistently surprising and individual composers of our time. Rorem cannot be bracketed with any school, he’s just himself, a man with a breadth of vision and imagination that transcends labels.'