May 7, 2005
Upcoming Rorem concert a must-see
Talked to composer Ned Rorem earlier this week briefly for a piece previewing his Rinker Playhouse concert May 14 with soprano Carole Farley, composer Lowell Liebermann and pianist William Hobbs. I wish I'd had more time to talk to him, or that he'd had more time, but it was a pleasure to chat with a man who is one of the leading lights of American classical music, as well as a distinguished literary man.
I've been listening to the Naxos disc of Rorem's songs recorded by the composer and Farley in Nantucket back in 2000, and playing through his Third Sonata for piano on my trusty old George Steck upright. This is a labor of much affection, and I find my enjoyment of the pieces growing as I get more familiar with them. Overall, Rorem has compiled a sophisticated and subtle body of music, beautifully and idiomatically crafted.
At this point in my study of the songs on this disc, I'm partial to the older pieces, in particular the ones from the late 1940s and early 1950s: Little Elegy, to a poem by Elinor Wylie; The Nightingale, to an anonymous 16th-century text; Lullaby of the Woman of the Mountain, to words by Pahdraic Pearse; What if some little pain … , to a text by Edmund Spenser; and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, to the famous poem by Robert Frost. All these songs date from 1947 to 1951.
I'm also fond of a 1958 song, Early in the Morning, to a poem by Robert Hillyer. In these songs, and indeed in most of his music with which I'm familiar, he reminds me most of Francis Poulenc (a Rorem friend); both composers speak the same kind of rich, elegant harmonic language, and both have absorbed the popular music of their times and made something rarified of it.
Poulenc was on of the finest writers of art songs in the 20th century, and the spirit of the song is evident in much of his music. He also is a composer of intense Catholic piety, but even in a work like the Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, there is something ravishing and worldly about the way the suffering of Jesus is depicted.
Rorem, younger by a generation (he was born in 1923), is an even subtler writer. If the melodies he writes aren't always as direct as Poulenc's, in a song like Night Crow, written in 1959 to a Theodore Roethke poem, distinctive melodic lines are everywhere you look in the fabric of the song. This gives the piece, which is only 2 minutes long, weight and depth, and is indicative of the concentrated compositional power Rorem brings to his writing. That's one of the reasons listening to these songs is so rewarding: You hear these background melodies come to the fore as you revisit them.
Rorem told me he's about a third of the way through his orchestrations for an opera based on Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The opera is scheduled to premiere next year at Indiana University, a standout music school renowned for its opera program. "I'm feeling very exposed," he said, referring to the familiarity of the play he's subjected to an operatic treatment.
That's a premiere I just might have to be in the audience for. I'm eager to see what Rorem makes of Wilder's durable theater piece, and the more I think about it, the more I think he might be an ideal composer for it. Emily's description of the mundanities she loves and misses can easily become overwhelmingly sentimental; a composer of deep emotion but high restraint such as Rorem might be precisely what you need to make that moment tell, but not become cloying.
The May 14 performance, called Songs of the Americas, is a premiere of a program Farley, Rorem and Liebermann are taking to London's Wigmore Hall in June, and then to other concert halls around the world. It's a rare chance for area audiences to hear an evening of important American music and poetry (songs by William Bolcom as well as by Cuba's Ernesto Lecuona also are on the program), and listeners who want to hear what our country's creative artists are up to shouldn't miss it.
