A Whitman-Inspired Recording from Richmond

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last month Reference Recordings released a new album of two compositions performed by the Richmond Symphony led by conductor Steven Smith. As can be seen from the above image of the cover, the entire album was inspired by the American poet Walt Whitman. The “program” of the album provides two perspectives on this particularly innovative nineteenth-century poet, one from the twentieth century by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and the other a world premiere recording of the music of contemporary American composer Mason Bates. Both are choral compositions featuring the Richmond Symphony Chorus, prepared by Director Erin R. Freeman. Vocal solos are taken by soprano Michelle Areyzaga and bass-baritone Kevin Deas.

The canon of Whitman’s poetry is pervaded by two major topics: himself and the American Civil War. The Vaughan Williams selection, his cantata Dona nobis pacem (grant us peace), was composed in 1936 and deals with the latter category. From a British perspective, the music looks back on World War I; but, by 1936, it was clear that World War I could no longer be regarded as “the war to end all wars.” Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and was already flexing his military muscles as a proxy in the Spanish Civil War.

In that context one can appreciate Vaughan Williams’ incorporation of American Civil War poems by Whitman, such as “Beat! beat! drums!” and “Dirge for Two Veterans.” He also followed that latter poem with one by another poet, “The Angel of Death” by John Bright. Most readers will recognize the cantata title as the final words of the Mass text, and they are interjected over the course of the cantata by soloist Areyzaga.

The Bates cantata, Children of Adam, begins the album with far more upbeat rhetoric. While much of the text involves Whitman reveling in his own creativity, the cantata as a whole constitutes a more general, but still exuberant, celebration of creation, drawing upon the Old Testament, a traditional text of the Mataponi Indians of Virginia, and two twentieth-century poems by Carl Sandburg. While Bates is probably best known for his skill in seamlessly integrating electronic sounds into instrumental compositions, his choral repertoire seems to suggest a departure from that technique. Thus, one of his most successful efforts, “Mass Transmission,” uses electronics very subtly and primarily to provide “sound effects” to clarify the descriptive text; and the Cappella SF recording of that composition couples it with Bates’ “Sirens,” composed only for an a cappella ensemble. Children of Adam, in turn, draws more heavily on an imaginatively diverse approach to the percussion section and may well depart entirely from electronica.

As a result, those familiar with Bates’ past work are likely to be pleasantly surprised by the new directions he is taking in dealing with sonority. Indeed, where “sound effects” are concerned, the drums and brass in “Beat! beat! drums!” probably provide more explicit associative impressions than do the corresponding dramatic elements in Bates’ libretto settings. Thus, the album, as a whole, makes for a highly satisfying juxtaposition of recent techniques from those roughly a century in the past.