Jennifer Bellor: Long These Days
Lexicon Classics

Long These Days by Las Vegas-based composer Jennifer Bellor is an art song tapestry of an unusual and distinctive kind. It's a melodically ravishing work that backs soprano Olivia Yokers and bass Norman Espinoza (she on three tracks and he on four others) with the composer on piano and Tasos Peltekis on electric guitar, the arrangements alone distancing it from other chamber-classical projects. Conceptually, the recording documents a day's passing from dawn to night and, drawing from the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Pablo Neruda, meditates on themes of love, longing, and nostalgia. Inclined to risk-taking, Bellor meticulously prepared the work but also had Peltekis improvise on the work's seven instrumental duets.

Recorded between late 2023 and early 2024, Long These Days is a sophisticated composition of integrity and craft; it's also, in keeping with her other recordings, an accessible and oft-rapturous work. With her fourth album, Bellor, who serves as Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, builds on the strengths of Stay (2016), Reflections at Dusk (2019), and Oneira (2022) by once again infusing harmonious chamber classical writing with inflections of popular music. The structure of Long These Days satisfies too in alternating between vocal parts and interludes, which feature piano and guitar only. The comparatively soothing latter act as instrumental counterpoint to the more intense vocal movements and thus allow the listener a moment to regroup before the onset of the next vocal narrative. She recruited three fine collaborators for the project, Yokers admired for her exceptional musicality and refined vocal timbre, Espinoza renowned for his powerful delivery, and Peltekis a schooled musician who began studying classical guitar at the age of nine.

Singing Rossetti's words, Yokers elevates the opening “Song of Flight” with a rhapsodic performance. It's Bellor's writing, of course, that grants the singer such a glorious showcase, and the soprano makes the most of it. Intricate guitar and piano embroidery flesh out the movement before the first interlude “Dawn” upholds the affirmative tone with a radiant awakening. Things shift dramatically when Espinoza delivers words of romantic passion from Neruda's “Mañana” with characteristic intensity. The coupling of electric guitar and piano with the singers' rich, resonant voices produces arresting blends. A moment of contemplation follows with “Interlude: Midday Reverie,” after which Espinoza returns for the pensive “Mediodía,” his reading of the Neruda text now exuding romantic desperation and threatening to become anguish. Yokers again soars for “Long These Days,” whose text comes from Rossetti's “A Smile and a Sigh” (“A smile because the nights are short! … A sigh because the days are long!”). The hours gradually slip away until we find ourselves arriving at the peaceful “Interlude: Nightscape,” serenading “Interlude: Eyelids Close,” and lyrical “Echo,” with Yokers inducing entrancement one last time (“Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream”) before the work resolves with “Postlude: Resurgence.”

Interestingly, Long These Days didn't emerge in one fell swoop but instead came together, its vocal movements at least, from separate song cycles, the parts featuring Yokers from Bellor's A Smile and a Sigh and those featuring Espinoza from her Cuatro Canciones De Las Últimas Horas (Four Songs of the Last Hours). Even so, it doesn't feel cobbled together but registers as a standalone work of multi-hued design, a tapestry in the truest sense. There's much to recommend about the piece, and Long These Days makes for a compelling addition to Bellor's discography. One caveat: ideally lyrics for the vocal movements would have had been included with the physical release, though Bellor does provide a link at her site to a PDF of the texts. To appreciate the work in its fullest sense, download the file so that the lyrics (which include Stephen Tapscott's translations of Neruda's Spanish poems) are on hand as the recording plays; both parts are integral for the project to be experienced as it should be. In addition, the back cover of the physical release indicates the work totals thirteen parts whereas it's actually fourteen (the eighth part, “Interlude: Daydream Getaway” is missing from the list). Such an error, while regrettable, doesn't detract from the powerful impression the work itself makes, however.

December 2024