New York Classical Review

While they weren’t explicitly programming to explore the riches of American music for this country’s 250ᵗʰ year, the Brooklyn Art Song Society nevertheless did put a substantial part of that greatness in front of an audience Sunday afternoon at Roulette. As the final event for this season’s series of song cycles, four singers and three pianists performed Ned Rorem’s 1997 work, Evidence of Things Not Seen. 

This is, quite simply, one of the finest song cycles in classical music, an equal to the famous ones from Schumann, Schubert, and other European composers. This is also a great American work, with settings of poetry and prose that focusses on American writers like Whitman, Stephen Crane, Paul Goodwin, and William Penn. There is also poetry from Auden, and Rorem’s own translation of text from Colette and Baudelaire, among other sources.

The title comes from Penn’s concluding verse about faith in the afterlife. It is the key statement that comes after ninety minutes of brilliant music that speaks with guileless sophistication and carries enormous expressive and compositional depth and power just beneath the surface. The musicians—soprano Sara LeMesh, mezzo-soprano Anna Laurenzo, tenor Daniel McGrew, baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, and pianists Mila Henry, Nana Shi, and Miori Sugiyama (who divided up the duties in three sections)—followed the music’s path in a performance that was good to start and grew in stature and force as it went along.

The songs switch between soloists and mix together duos and trios, the full ensemble coming together for the hymns and selected songs. They, and Rorem’s composing, made the time fly by. Or, better put, the experience was so engrossing that there was no sense of passing time, and turning pages to follow the text, one was surprised and a bit disappointed to see the end in sight, even after thirty-plus individual songs. Each is a piece of a kind of quilt, with patches for love, war, aging, death, desire, tenderness, anger, solace, and more. 

Rorem structured this in three groups, “Beginnings,” “Middles,” and “Ends.” These are introduced in the opening ensemble, singing his own text that distills what’s to come into declarative lines. As he wrote in the liner notes to the single recording, “The order of songs relies on subject matter…songs about moving forward, and the wistful optimism of love … the second group … about coming of age, horror of war, romantic disappointment … last group … about death.” He concludes each group with a hymn.

What makes this remarkable are Rorem’s taste and judgement in the texts—a short Theodore Roethke poem that connects creation and destruction; a wonderful contemplation on death by Colette; an excerpt from an angry, gripping poem about AIDS from Mark Doty—and his own exceptional craft. Most songs support and surround the words with music, and Rorem integrates the two with exquisite balance and without direct word-painting. Everything is as clear, communicative, and flowing as conversation.

There is also a seemingly impossible variety in the music, and no concept of repeats. Rorem is thought of as a conservative composer, but that’s a dated consideration dependent on the temporary vogue for atonality. The music in Evidence mixes consonance and dissonance, antiphonal and contrapuntal phrases that sound free, rhythmic complexity—composing, in other words. Much of this is just simple elegance and wisdom: for Thomas Kern’s 1709 “Hymn for Morning,” sung by the ensemble a cappella and the end of the first section, there is music only between verses—brief, wild, modernist modulations poised against the precise poetic syntax. 

This was an example of the high quality of the performance. The singers came together with a bright, airy sound and blend, there was a beatific feeling set against music meant to unsettle and tumble the ear toward the next section. In that, Langston Hughes’ short “Comment on War,” sung by the sopranos, had a light touch and stunning irony in the singing. Goodman’s “A Terrible Disaster,” about unrequited love, has one of the plainest settings, and McGrew’s gorgeous singing made it as intense as it was soft.

LeMesh delivered some intense, high, sustained notes with controlled vibrato and a sound like an elegant cutting instrument. Laurenzo had a passionate quality to her singing, like with the Robert Browning setting, “Life in a Love.” McGrew took a few songs to relax and open up his voice, and when he did had an easy, intimate expression. Sullivan was outstanding—perhaps Rorem’s music for the baritone, like Auden’s “Dear, Through the Night …”, is just slightly stronger than the rest—with a satisfying sense that he understood the music. 

What elevated the entire cycle was the kind of certainty that comes from real familiarity and sympathy with the music, producing a feeling that the performance is deep inside the work. There was nothing demonstrative, only direct, assured and insistent. The ambiguous rocking between major and minor in the last song, with the ensemble singing with a bright manner, made Rorem’s setting of Penn’s words piquant, bittersweet, with an effect sublime in its spiraling meaning: ” … we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.”

Brooklyn Art Song Society launches their New Voices Festival of 21st Century art songs, 5 p.m. April 12. brooklynartsongsociety.org