by Marvin J. Ward

Amherst, MA, 15 November 2009.  Tenor William Hite, of the UMass Music Department here, gave his Faculty Recital this afternoon.  It contained 4 sets of songs, 2 being groupings of individual ones, and 2 being premières of cycles commissioned or composed for Hite and his accompanists, their composers present in the Performing Arts Center’s Bezanson Recital Hall.  It was a remarkably varied offering involving 4 different languages and compositional styles, a fine model for his students and a real pleasure for his listeners.

The opening set was of the most standard sort of art song recital repertoire of the 4: a group of 6 lieder by Felix Mendelssohn, setting texts by 5 different poets: “Schilflied,” Op. 71/4 to a poem by Lenau, “Des Mädchens Klage,” Op. post. (Schiller), “Der Mond,” Op. 86/5 (Geibel), “Das Waldenschloss,” Op. post. (Eichendorf), “Es weiss und rät,” Op. 99/6 (Eichendorf), and “Im Grünen,” Op. 8/11 (Voss).

The 2 première cycles bracketed the intermission.  The 1st was by UMass Professor emeritus Charles Bestor (b. 1924): Nursery Rhymes for Grown-Ups.  It sets 7 well-known childhood songs and 1 poem, with twists and variants to suit them to this concept.  The composer was inspired by Hite’s daughters Olivia and Marlena and his own grand-daughter Cady, with 1 number included specifically for each of the 3, the 2nd, “C-C-C-Cady,” 3rd “A Vocalise for Marlena,” and 6th “Olivia’s ‘The Going to Bed Book’ (Scrub, scrub, scrub).”  The opening and closing ones dealt with stars: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Starlight, Star Bright” respectively, thus creating the cyclical sense.  The 4th was “All Through the Night (lullaby for a Chinese Princess), the 5th, “Stickie Stickie Stombo,” and the 7th, the poem, Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky,” which originally appeared in his Through the Looking Glass.  It is clear from the titles that Bestor has a bent for the humorous, and the music does, too, all of it simple and light, often with a twist of the original and an unexpected turn, but varied and well suited to the texts.  This was a quite successful, charming, and very entertaining work.

After the break, we heard Jeff Myers’ (b. 1977) The Age of Assassins, a cycle of 6 songs for tenor, horn, and piano, setting texts by Arthur Rimbaud: 3 verse poems from his Album Zutique and Poésies, and 3 prose poems from Les Illuminations (Source was mis-identified as his Une Saison en Enfer in the handout).  The poems are: “Chanson de la plus haute tour” (AZ), “Veillées III” (I), “L’Éternité” (AZ) “Matinée d’ivresse” (I) “Sensation” (P), and “Mémoire V” (AZ).  The title of the cycle comes from the last line of the 4th poem.  Myers selected his texts in a very unorthodox way, picking and choosing lines of verse and snippets of prose rather than setting the poems in their entirety, and in the case of the final 2, blending them together, thus in effect creating a text of his own to conform to and convey his concept of an exalted drug-induced state of heightened sensitivity that the poet is known to have created for himself.  Then Myers created a sound world for it, with some preparation of the piano for some of the songs and plucking of its strings for 1.  And he succeeded in creating one that accurately and effectively evokes the state the text describes.  It is a brilliant and powerful piece, one that ought not to linger in obscurity as such commissions often do, but join in recitals the company of other more traditional songs that use horn along with piano.

The concluding set was a group of 5 Russian songs by 4 different composers, all using texts by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, the final 1 set by 2 composers from 2 different centuries, making for an interesting ‘compare and contrast’ experience.  The set opened with Alexandr Dargomïzhsky’s “I loved you,” followed by Alexandr Borodin’s “For the shores of your distant homeland,” by Mikhail Glinka’s “I remember the wondrous moment,” and his “Do not sing, my beauty, to me,” with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s setting of this poem closing the group.  Because of the linguistic challenges, not many singers tackle Russian songs, but they are lovely, and while many are very much in the Romantic tradition, they are very different from the German Romantic one, often much more dramatic.

Hite is a very dramatic recitalist; no statue he.  In some songs, he actually acted out the movements recounted by the texts.  In others, he let his arms and hands do some talking.  He has a broad vocal range, without any weakness at either end, and uses it to the fullest for expression.  His accompanist for the 2 traditional sets was UMass faculty pianist Ludmila Krasin, a native speaker of Russian who was also his coach for that language.  His piano partner for the 2 premières was Gregory Hayes, of the Dartmouth faculty and music director of the Northampton UU Fellowship.  The hornist for the Myers cycle was Laura Klock, who actually arranged the commission with a grant from the International Horn Society.  All gave stunning performances, matching Hite's.

Notes by thier composers were provided for the 2 premières.  Texts and translations were provided for the songs in German and French, although for the latter, the complete texts of the poems were given, so it was not easy to follow the songs since the portions set were not formatted to stand out from the rest.  For the Russian songs, only translations were provided; no texts were necessary for those in English, except perhaps for “The Jabberwocky.”