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Classical Recordings
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: February 3, 2008
LISA BIELAWA:
‘A Handful of World’
Lisa Bielawa, vocalist; Carla Kihlstedt,
violinist and vocalist; Jacqueline Leclair, English hornist;
Cerddorion, conducted by Kristina Boerger. Tzadik 8039; CD.
AS a singer in the Philip Glass Ensemble and a founder of the
adventurous MATA Festival, Lisa Bielawa has become better known
for promoting other composers’ music than for her own. That
imbalance has lately been redressed, thanks to high-profile
commissions and a residency with the Boston Modern Orchestra
Project. And though she remains woefully underrepresented on
disc, “A Handful of World” hints at the variety of her work.
The unifying principle of this musically disparate collection
is literary. Ms. Bielawa takes her texts from Kafka’s
meditations, the Book of Lamentations and Aeschylus’
“Suppliant Maidens,” and she responds to each with music
that suggests a deeply personal and contemporary resonance for
even the most ancient and mythical of them.
“Kafka Songs” (2003) is scored for a violinist who sings,
a tall order given the rhythmic independence of the two lines
and the fluidity with which the vocal music moves through
stretches of octave-hopping angularity, Sprechstimme and poplike
styles. Carla Kihlstedt’s dark-hued, vibrato-free soprano and
energetic violin draw a focused emotional intensity from this
unsettled quality.
Ms. Bielawa does her own singing in “A Collective
Cleansing” (2000), but where Ms. Kihlstedt’s performance was
recorded without overdubbing, Ms. Bielawa’s is a study in
electronic technique. She makes her way through the Aeschylus
text as a soloist, as both voices in closely harmonized duets
and as a thick-textured chorus, with spatial effects and
rumbling electronic sounds. The results are stylized and
seductive, with a sense of melding the antique and the
futuristic.
That effect also animates “Lamentations for a City”
(2004), in which an overlay of whispering gives the wrenching
emotionality of the Jeremiah text setting a haunted quality, and
an English horn line amplifies the changing mood of the choral
writing, rendered here by the vocal ensemble Cerddorion. ALLAN
KOZINN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/arts/music/03reco.html?ex=1202706000&en=2c5488c9de6930f2&ei=5070&emc=eta1
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