Eric Choate / Joseph Stillwell / David Conte: Nature, Love, and Death
Arsis Audio

If the song cycles by Eric Choate, Joseph Stillwell, and David Conte complement one another exceptionally well on this Arsis Audio release, there are perhaps good reasons why. Not only do they serve on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Choate and Stillwell are former students of Conte's. As fundamentally different as their cycles are on thematic grounds, their works nevertheless partner splendidly. Certainly the connection between the cycles is tightened when all are brought to magnificent realization by tenor Brian Thorsett, conductor Jeffrey Thomas, and the San Francisco Conservatory Chamber Orchestra.

Consistent with the album title, Choate's … and Fall (2016) meditates on the poignancy of autumn through the prism of five twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poets, Stillwell's Songs of Love and Solace considers a young man's experiences of love through settings of poems by William Butler Yeats, and Conte's American Death Ballads uses anonymous texts from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries as a springboard for explorations of murder, death, and dying. Conte's cycle won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award in 2016, but all three reward attention.

Thorsett elevates the performances with a clear, bright tenor equal to the rich emotional terrain the cycles encompass. He's performed in over 100 operatic roles and as a concert singer commands a repertoire that exceeds 300 works. Thomas is Artistic Director of the American Bach Soloists but also a fervent advocate for contemporary music; included among the new operas he's conducted are Conte's Gift of the Magi and Firebird Motel. The recipient of multiple honours and one of Nadia Boulanger's last students, Conte (b. 1955) has composed over 150 works, including operas, a musical, film scores, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, band, and chamber music. He's been Professor of Composition at the San Francisco Conservatory since 1985 and was appointed the department's chair in 2014. Choate (b. 1990), whose pieces have been performed by VOCES8, Vancouver Chamber Choir, and others, is an in-demand choral and orchestral conductor who in 2019 was appointed Artistic Director of the San Francisco Boys Chorus. He's also organist and choirmaster at The Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin in San Francisco and is professor of choral and organ music at SFCM. Like his colleagues, Stillwell (b. 1984) has composed for a variety of genres, from choral ensemble and art song to chamber music and orchestra. Writing for the San Francisco Classical Voice, Janos Gereben characterized his music as “complex and yet instantly appealing, gorgeously tonal but not ‘old- fashioned',” and much the same could be said about all three of the cycles presented. Each is expressive, often lyrical and sometimes rapturous, and sophisticated in form.

Choate's longstanding affection for the season resonates throughout … and Fall (2016), not only because of personal memories but because of the poignancy associated with summer's end, the anticipation of winter chill, and the awareness of time's swift advance. “Sleep” inaugurates the cycle on a rapturous note, the composer's quietly majestic art song sensitively rendered by Thorsett and the orchestra. Mood shifts follow in the affectionate reverie “Neighbors in October,” crepuscular “All Hallows” (the latter's text by Choate), and playful “Theme in Yellow,” all such contrasts expertly modulated by the tenor, before “November Night” ends the cycle with a wry acknowledgement of autumn's passing. The mood lifts when Stillwell introduces Songs of Love and Solace (2013) with the almost Britten-esque “Brown Penny” and its youthful musings upon love. Humble yet nonetheless passionate declarations are directed by the poet to his beloved in “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” after which the plaintive “When Your Are Old” finds the poet tenderly casting his eye on the future with unclouded vision and seeing his beloved “old and grey and full of sleep.” At cycle's close, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” presents the poet, now alone, resolving to abandon society for the stillness and beauty of nature. Lyrical and pastoral, the song concludes the work magnificently.

Conte drew for inspiration in part for American Death Ballads (2015) from Copland's Old American Songs and Conrad Susa's Two Murder Ballads. Each of the four songs is conceived musically in accordance with its text, the result a cycle rich in dramatic contrast. “Wicked Polly” exudes the air of a folk morality tale, its titular character having lived a dissolute life until, crippled by illness, she discovers it's too late to repent. Conte's music strikingly mirrors the emotional turbulence of Polly's initial descent into sickness and eventual plunge into hell. “The Unquiet Grave” tells of a grieving young man who begs a kiss from his deceased lover who replies that rather than join her in death he would be better to enjoy the life he still has. The music flows gracefully, yet daring harmonic gestures lend the song an unsettled quality in keeping with the storyline. Death rears its head again in “The Dying Californian,” this time in the form of a letter a dying sailor writes as he travels to California to seek his fortune in the gold fields. After opening with the singer unaccompanied to accentuate the bleakness of the sailor's condition, the tone gradually brightens and culminates in his closing affirmation, “I've gained a port called Heaven / Where the gold will never rust.” American Death Ballads spiritedly concludes with “Captain Kidd,” a rambunctious portrait of a defiant Scottish sailor who was tried and executed for piracy and murder in 1701. The song's not without a lesson, however, as indicated by Kidd's final words, “Take warning now by me, and shun bad company / Lest you come to hell with me, for I must die.”

If the tone of “Captain Kidd” appears worlds away from, say, Stillwell's “When Your Are Old” or Choate's “Sleep,” that's exactly as it should be when all three composers align their musical concepts to their songs' texts. Nature, Love, and Death illustrates that principle thirteen times over in this stellar fifty-minute presentation.

February 2023