There is a problem or two of presentation here which I'd better get out of the way first. Most of Eisler's partsongs and Nancy Van de Vate's gruesomely entertaining Cocaine Lil are here sung in such a heavily inflected English that you'll need the words in front of you. They are provided, but here comes the second problem. A few of Eisler's songs and Cornelius Schwehr's ironically titled German Dances are sung in German, but the words are untranslated; in the case of Gerhard Ruhm's ''spoken quartets'' not even the German texts are provided (German listeners who don't speak English will also find that Cocaine Lil is untranslated).
Eisler wrote the Liederbuchlein in America in 1941 (at the same time as one of his most popular works, the Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain) for a fellow refugee who was teaching music at a girls' school in Woodburry, Connecticut. Most of the songs are settings of well-known English or American nursery rhymes and children's games, and it is striking how serious Eisler takes them. ''Little Miss Muffet'' is no amusing anecdote but a brief study of alarm: it must have been a very large spider. At the end of ''Early to bed and early to rise'' Eisler stops and quite seriously asks ''Is this really the way to be wealthy and wise?''; he finds a haunted mystery in the pure nonsense of ''There was an old man'' (''and he had a calf, and that half. He took him out of the stall, and put him on the wall. And that's all'')—his setting is almost eerie. A mysterious Schubert quotation turns up in ''I like little pussy, her coat is so warm'', and at the end of the blues-ish ''I had a little doggie'' there is a distinctly elegiac impression that the convalescent doggie may in fact be dead. Maybe there's a clue to the reason for all this in Eisler's sudden switch, in the sixteenth of the 20 songs, into German and a serious, deeply felt and elegiac vein. Eisler, surrounded by strange anglophones who found milkmaid-threatening spiders funny, was homesick, and in the German settings all the latent melancholy and nostalgia of the English ones comes pouring out affectingly and hauntingly.
Ruhm's quartets are brief, ingenious and entertaining, but without the words they are bound to seem a bit same-y. His Foetus has no words, using breaths, clicking consonants, eventually held notes and oscillating chords to evoke the last four months of pregnancy and (a sharp intake of breath) birth. His Creation is similar in effect but shorter: a cumulative chanting of the numbers 1 to 23. Now I've told you, you could probably write them yourself. Schwehr's piece uses similar resources and fragments of a text by Brecht to evoke images of enforced silence: the impression of haunted terror built by these sotto voce mutterings is strangely vivid. All these ''extended vocal techniques'' turn up in Van de Vate's piece, too, but there they combine with strong rhythm, a handful of percussion instruments (one sounds very like a bicycle bell), an only half-ironic reference to Chopin's funeral march and eloquent melody of her own into a horridly gripping portrayal of self-destruction. The all-women Bel Canto Ensemble are virtuosos of all the things that voices can do other than sing, but they're good vocalists too (one of them doubles at times as a serviceable baritone), and they are decently recorded.'