Alexander Goehr
Sing, Ariel
The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid
The Death of Moses
AllMusic Review
by Blair Sanderson
A central figure in the British avant-garde, Alexander Goehr founded the New Music Manchester Group with composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. Like his fellows, he has composed music that is challenging, theatrical, and startlingly original, regularly adapting elements of modal and tonal music into his sublimated serial language. However, Goehr's music is more abstract, gentle, and introspective than that of his peers, and the net effect of his works is one of glowing sonorities and delicate fragments that kaleidoscopically shift. This NMC reissue on the archival label Ancora presents three vocal works that represent the composer at his peak.
Sing, Ariel is a quasi-dramatic interpretation of English texts drawn from 15 poets ranging from Campion to Auden, devised by Frank Kermode. This shimmering song cycle receives a marvelous performance from soprano Lucy Shelton and fine ensemble playing directed by Oliver Knussen.
Shelton also turns in an ethereal account of The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid, a setting for unaccompanied soprano of Marianne Moore's magical poem.
The Death of Moses is a cantata in which Renaissance techniques are smoothly blended with modern devices. Stephen Cleobury leads an ensemble of vocalists, choirs, and instrumentalists to powerful effect in this tragic work, which in many places is evocative of the neo-Classical style of Stravinsky.
Disc ONE
Sing, Ariel, Op. 51, Pt. 1
1 'Sing, Ariel, Sing'
2 'He Ceast, and Then Gan'
3 Fughetta (sopra un sogetto di O. Messiaen) - Piano Solo
4 'Tell Her That Shreds'
5 'Such A Sacred and Home-felt Delight'
6 'Rose-cheeked Laura, Come'
7 (Echo) 'Such Sober Certainty'
Sing, Ariel, Op. 51, Pt. 2
8 'O You Are Well-tun'd Now'
9 'Old Lecher with a Love on Every Wind'
10 'Across the Street a Tenor Whine'
11 'With Woeful Measures Wan Despair'
12 'Thus I, Faltering Forward'
13 Postlude
Sing, Ariel, Op. 51, Pt. 3
14 '...Rebuke, The Raging Heart'
15 'There is so Much to Celebrate'
16 (Instrumental)
17 'I See Them All'
18 '...My Unground Grain'
19 'The Time of Year'
Sing, Ariel, Op. 51, Pt. 4
20 Adagio (With Cadenza) '...Unanxious One, Sing'
21 'I Squeezed Up the Last Stair'
Sing, Ariel, Op. 51, Pt. 5
22 'Thou Hast nor Youth nor Age'
23 'The Palm at the End of The Mind'
24 (Echo) 'Without Human Meaning'
25 'All's in Deep Sleep and Night'
26 'The Rock of Autumn, Glittering'
27 (No. 1 Completed) '...Brilliantly, Lightly'
28 The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid, Op. 54
Disc TWO:
The Death Of Moses, Op. 53
1 Let Me Sing of the Tears
2 Man's Fears are the Fires
3 To the Man Who?
4 Today Is Now My Last
5 And There He Saw Not Only
6 I Will Not Die!
7 O Earth!
8 All Creatures Were Formed
9 But Then When Moses
10 But Others Tell It
11 Nor Did His Mother
Previously released on Unicorn-Kanchana DKP(CD)9129 & DKP(CD)9146