The Listener’s Gallery

Abstract

The Listener's Gallery Gregory Berg Click for larger view View full resolution Gregory Berg ________ Bold Beauty: Songs by Juliana Hall. Molly Fillmore, soprano; Elvia Puccinelli, piano. (Blue Griffin Recordings BGR 559; 61:00) Letters from Edna: "To Mr. Ficke and Mr. Bynner," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1913," "To Anne Gardner Lynch," "To Harriet Monroe," "To Norma Millay," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1943," "To Arthur Davison Ficke—1930," "To Mother." Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush: "To Eudocia C. Flynt," "To T.W. Higginson," "To Emily Fowler (Ford)," "To Samuel Bowles the Younger," "To Eugenia Hall," "To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) I," "To Susan Gilbert (Dickinson) II." Theme in Yellow: "Song," "Ripe Corn," "November," "Theme in Yellow," "Splinter," "Haze Gold." Cameos: "Sarah Albritton," "Kay WalkingStick," "Nellie Mae Rowe," "Alice Dalton Brown," "Agnes Pelton," "Corita Kent." There is more than one pathway to greatness. It is sometimes achieved through unstinting focus on a specific goal from the moment one begins harboring professional or vocational aspirations of any kind. But greatness can also be achieved once someone has relinquished one goal in favor of another. That change in course can be disconcerting, to say the least, but any success that follows is exceptionally sweet. Juliana Hall has scored incredible success in the realm of art song, despite being something of a late bloomer as a composer. The daughter of a gifted pianist, Hall devoted many years to piano study and achieved a high degree of excellence. It was only while pursuing a graduate degree in piano at Yale School of Music that she found herself drawn toward and directed into composition. She had dabbled in composition from time to time, as so many gifted musicians do, and had always had interest in poetry and theater, but this was the point in her life when composition became the primary focus of her considerable talents and energy. As if to confirm the wisdom of her bold choice, Hall earned a master's degree in composition and within months was hard at work on her first commission—a song cycle for soprano Dawn Upshaw. From that auspicious start, Hall has gone on to craft highly regarded works for some of the world's most esteemed singers, including Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Dean Griffey, and Brian Asawa. She remains one of the world's most prolific and lauded art song composers, with her creative energies burning as brightly as ever. The release Bold Beauty is a marvelous collection that combines three early song sets (from 1989, 1990, and 1993) with a more recent one composed in 2018. Every measure of music recorded here is a clear demonstration of Hall's exceptional abilities for taking almost any kind of text and giving it new life through music. Two of these four song collections are actually settings of letters rather than poems, but Hall does not seem the least troubled by the challenge of setting nonpoetic texts to music. On the contrary, she seems to relish the challenge, because it seems to draw especially vivid music from her pen. Of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson are not exactly typical letter writers, and one can certainly sense their poetic voice lurking just beneath the surface. Letters from Edna consists of songs that are every bit as colorful and vivid as the poet herself. There is an almost jaunty joy in these letters, no matter what the circumstances under which they were written; one can sense Millay's intense love of language in the way she puts words together. There is a very different mood at play in Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, which are settings of letters by the fascinating and enigmatic Emily Dickinson. Although there are certainly dashes of humor and irreverence, there is also more an atmosphere of mystery overhanging these songs. Hall turns to more conventional texts for her beautifully crafted Theme in Yellow, which draws upon poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg, among others. She tells us in the liner notes that, earlier in her career, her typical practice was to choose a theme for a given song cycle or set and then search for poems that would align...