Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen Debuts on AVIE Records

Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen on the cover of his new album

Around the beginning of this month, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen made his solo recital debut on AVIE Records with the release of an album entitled Uncharted. I first became aware of him in the summer of 2016, when he was in the Merola Opera training program. Training concluded with a public performance of opera excepts taking place on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Cohen’s contribution was to sing Orfeo’s aria “Che farò seza Euridice?,” from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s three-act opera Orfeo ed Euridice.

The “world” of Uncharted is a far cry from the world of Gluck. With one exception, the album focuses on the interplay of the creative powers of Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their friend and colleague, Johannes Brahms. That one exception is the very first selection on the album, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 14, a collection of four songs given the title Lieder des Abschieds (songs of farewell). Those familiar with the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century will probably be reminded of “Der Abschied, the title of the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (the song of the earth), which was completed in 1907. However, Lieder des Abschieds was composed over ten years later, and I would conjecture that memories of Mahler did not interfere with Korngold’s own capacities for invention.

That said, I found myself more appreciative of Korngold’s “turf” than I was in the selections that spanned the interplay between the Schumanns and Brahms. To be fair, my preference may have had to do with my first encounter with Korngold writing for piano and voice, rather than harnessing a full orchestral ensemble. In that respect, I was as struck by the piano accompaniment by John Churchwell as I was by Cohen’s repertoire selections. Nevertheless, when taken as a whole, Uncharted unfolds as a journey through a diversity of approaches to invention. I suspect that my attention will lead me back to this album whenever I grow weary of all-too-familiar recordings!