The Masterful Lori Laitman
2007; Routledge; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2769-4046
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Musicological Studies
ResumoIT IS RARE WHEN PIECE OF MUSIC can be called a masterpiece. The plausibility of using such a term creates skepticism and begs for proof. If not proof, the designation yearns for a full explanation, at least. Such a work must display the highest level of compositional skill and excellence without pretense or artificiality of technique in its creation. It should impart a vivid depiction of its aesthetic intent and cause the listener to be forever changed for having experienced it. Further, the consequence of its performance should be a demand that it be repeated frequently, since its absence would diminish the lives of all potential listeners. The American song composer, Lori Laitman, has been lauded by reviewers as one of the most extraordinary song composers working today, likening her to Ned Rorem. She has an innate ability to capture the essence of textual meaning, a keen perception of vocal nuance, and a lavish intellectual and musical vocabulary that she uses with a facile ease. It was with all of these extraordinary skills that she created a magnificent song cycle called The Seed of Dream. Written in 2004 for baritone, cello, and piano, it sets several poems of the Vilna Ghetto survivor Abraham Sutzkever (b. 1913). version for mezzo soprano, cello, and piano is also available. The cycle was commissioned by Music of Remembrance, a Seattle-based nonprofit organization dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians and their art through extraordinary musical performances. Their artistic director is Mina Miller, who performs as the pianist on the upcoming recording of this work with baritone Erich Parce and cellist Amos Yang. The work is approximately twenty minutes long and contains five songs: I Lie in This Coffin; A Load of Shoes; To My Child; Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars; and No Sad Songs, Please. The composer states that four of the five poems were translated by Pulitzer Prize winning poet C. K. Williams, while 'Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars' was translated by Leonard Wolf. Sutzkever consistently produced poems of great artistry under the most dire circumstances. These first-person accounts, written between 1941 and 1944, bear witness not only to the destruction around him, but also to his undying belief in the beauty of the word and the world. Each of the five songs is uniquely crafted to embody the textual expression with descriptive melodies, harmonic underpinnings, and sympathetic timbres that identify even the subtlest, changeable emotions. The music is filled with rubato, marked tempo changes, and an elasticity that is built into the musical lines. Due to the composers compositional flexibility and obvious appreciation for nuance, each song uses the voice and instruments in a slightly different way. Laitman knows how to get the very best from the baritone voice, giving it opportunities to use a full range of dynamics and allowing it to have heights of drama, lyric lines, as well as delicacy of articulation and interpretation. The voice is used in a traditional way throughout with an occasional glissando and a little humming. The use of the cello as a conversationalist with the voice and piano is brilliant and provides intense emotion and extraordinarily refined color changes throughout the piece. I Lie in This Coffin, written in 1941, is based on the poet's own experience of hiding from the Germans in a coffin. The song opens like a death knell in the piano at the bottom of its range. Colors and texture change as the cello enters while the singer desperately appeals to the spirit of his dead sister to come and be with him to comfort him in his fear. He is strengthened by her spirit and the song ends with happier music, hope, and a sense of optimism as the singer loses all ability to speak words, singing only ah, first delicately, then most dramatically, followed by an emotional hum to the end. In A Load of Shoes (1943), Sutzkever notices his mother's shoes a year after her death. …
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