AGAVE: In Her Hands
Acis
If AGAVE's latest release, a collaboration with soprano Michele Kennedy, seems especially panoramic in scope, it should: its set-list spans no less than four centuries. Focusing exclusively on works by female composers, In Her Hands features songs by Black American composers Florence Price (1887-1953) and Margaret Bonds (1913-72) alongside instrumental pieces by Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-96), Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-47), Barbara Strozzi (1619-77), Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), and others. One comes away from the release believing there's nothing musically AGAVE, based in the San Francisco Bay area and comprising Aaron Westman and Anna Washburn (violins), Katherine Kyme and Cynthia Black (violas), William Skeen (cello), Kevin Cooper (guitar, theorbo), and Henry Lebedinsky (harpsichord, organ, piano), can't do. Guiding the ensemble through its paces are co-directors Westman and Lebedinsky.
In bringing Kennedy into the fold, In Her Hands perpetuates the approach AGAVE adopted for its 2021 release, the Grammy-nominated American Originals: A New World, A New Canon, which paired the chamber ensemble with countertenor Reginald L. Mobley. Bringing attention to underrepresented composers is again a theme, with AGAVE doing its part to give the material Schumann, Price, Bonds, and others created its due. Certainly both the composers and Kennedy, making her solo recording debut, benefit from the exposure. Founded in 2008, AGAVE specializes in string chamber music of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, and certainly the nineteen performances on the sixty-five-minute In Her Hands bear that out.
Recorded at First Presbyterian San Anselmo in California in late December 2022, the album's sequencing sees spirituals and gospel songs alternating with non-vocal settings, the result an ever-changing programme. The tone is set by an inspired reading of “Hold On,” brought to exquisite realization by Kennedy and AGAVE's strings and the first of three resonant Bonds selections (the brooding instrumental “Troubled Water” and rousing gospel song “She's Got the Whole World in Her Hands” the others). With Cooper added, they succeed as splendidly in their touching version of “Lizette, ma chère amie” (from Five Creole Songs) by Black American pianist, composer, singer, and ethnomusicologist Camille Nickerson (1888-1982). Price's artistry is well-accounted for in four vocal songs, including the lyrical “Night,” spiritual “You Won't Find a Man Like Jesus,” and “To My Little Son,” a loving paean to childhood.
On the instrumental front, Schumann's Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, Op. 16, No. 3 is eloquently rendered, the strings investing Clara's neo-Baroque material with Romantic passion, as is the solemn “Adagio ma non troppo” from Mendelssohn Hensel's String Quartet in E-Flat Minor. Indicative of the challenges aspiring women composers have faced throughout history, Fanny, Felix's sister, never published a note until the year before her death at forty-one, despite having composed an oratorio, chamber works, more than 250 songs, and over 100 piano pieces. The nostalgic Erinnerung (Memory) by Dora Pejacevic (1885-1923) sings as sweetly in the strings' hands, as does the wistful Forgotten by guitarist Catharina Josepha Pratten (1821-95) in Cooper's. Published in 1913 for solo organ, the aptly titled Pastorale by Ethel Kathleen Sutton (1873-1955) receives a full AGAVE makeover and benefits from the expansive new arrangement.
Credit must be given to AGAVE on curatorial grounds for the historical breadth of the material featured. Consider by way of example Canzona Seconda à 4, which stems from a 1630 volume of sacred music by Italian nun Claudia Francesca Rusca (1593-1676). Versatility must be Kennedy's middle name, as the singer shows herself to be as adept at delivering the songs by Bonds and Price as a formal classical setting such as the graceful sacred cantata In braccio di Maria by seventeenth-century composer Antonia Padoani Bembo. Enhancing the release is a booklet that contains illuminating details about the artists and their works, something that's especially helpful when some of the composers' backgrounds are less well-known than others. If there's anything to criticize, it's that at times the transition from one piece to the next is jarring when differences in content and presentation are so pronounced. As criticisms go, however, it's a minor one that hardly diminishes what AGAVE and Kennedy have achieved with the release.December 2023