Buonaiuto’s Debut Starkland Album Disappoints

courtesy of Starkland

Those that have followed this site for some time know that I have been particularly impressed by the listening experiences provided by Boulder-based Starkland. One of the most memorable of those experiences came with the album devoted entirely to Žibuoklė Martinaitytė’s uninterrupted 70-minute “In Search of Lost Beauty….” Nevertheless, it is “a truth universally acknowledged” that good things cannot go on forever; and I am afraid that I have now encountered my first Starkland disappointment.

Marfa Songs is the debut album of soprano Danielle Buonaiuto, which presents the premiere recordings of four emerging composers. The first of these, written by James Young, provides the title of the entire album. The second composer, Cecilia Livingston, is represented by two individual songs, “Kalypso” and “Penelope.” Natalie Draper’s O sea-starved, hungry sea was originally composed for a chamber ensemble and is presented on this album as the premiere of the subsequent version for piano and soprano. The album then concludes with Douglas Buchanan’s mini-cycle, Scots and Waters. The pianist for all four of these performances is John Wilson.

It would be understatement to call Buonaiuto’s voice impressive. She can jump through hoops that require a prodigious stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, it is hard to come away from these performances without thinking that those hoops are little more than virtuosity for its own sake. All four of the composers appear to be depressingly tone-deaf to the language behind the texts. All that seems to matter is a need to account for each individual phoneme with its own characteristic sonority. Buonaiuto may be the first vocalist since Cathy Berberian to endow each of those phonemes with the attention that the composer demands, and she might do well to consider revival performances of compositions by Luciano Berio that reflected his interest in the study of psycholinguistics. On the other hand I expect that I shall be cautious in approaching the work of any of the four composers contributing to this album.