Art Song Colorado Not Ready for Prime Time

courtesy of Classical Music Communications

Today marked the release of the fifth album to be produced by Art Song Colorado. As of this writing El Rebelde is apparently only available for digital download, the best source being an Amazon.com Web page. Unfortunately, that Web page offers only the nineteen tracks of the album, meaning that all the information that went into preparing a booklet for the release has been neglected.

The album was produced by Margaret McDonald, working with Executive Producers Eapen Leubner and Andrew Garland, the latter being the baritone that sings all of the tracks. The first thirteen of those tracks present three compositions by Gabriela Lena Frank. They are complemented by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 100, a collection of six Spanish songs with texts translated into Russian. Garland is accompanied at the piano by Jeremy Reger. One of the tracks is Frank’s “Las cinco lunas de Lorca” (the five moons of Lorca), which is a duet for tenor and baritone. The participating tenor is Javier Abreu.

Frank is, of course, a significant presence here in the Bay Area. I have Old First Concerts to thank for my “first contact” with her music; and one of her compositions for solo violin will be performed this coming October in the first concert of the 52nd season to be presented by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Ever since my first encounter with her music, I have been curious about the works created by this woman whose mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent and whose father is an American whose ancestors were Lithuanian Jews.

As one might guess, just about everything Frank has composed has emerged from a rich background. It is unclear who wrote the introductions (probably McDonald) for the three Frank selections on the album; but these are “first person” writings that do little justice to Frank’s own thoughts about the music. Most important is the first of those selections, which is a work in progress. Entitled Cantos de Cifar y el Mar Dulce (songs of Cifar and the sweet sea), it consists of five songs from an extended cycle that will be a seventy-minute composition when completed. Two of the songs are structured as multiple movements (three for one and two for the other). Fortunately, there is a Web page on which one can read Frank’s own background material for the tracks on this album. The Web site for that page also includes a Web page for the four Andean songs that Frank composed in 1999 and a somewhat more modest Web page for “Las cinco lunas de Lorca.” As to the Shostakovich songs, there is a useful Web page on the Musical Musings blog.

Taken as a whole, the performances on this album tend to come across as overwrought, particularly when Frank was more likely trying to be intense, leaving me wondering if there are more satisfying accounts of not only Frank’s music but also Shostakovich’s.