Tyler Duncan & Erika Switzer: A Left Coast
Bridge Records

A love letter to Canada's western shores from baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer, A Left Coast features songs written by friends and colleagues from the University of British Columbia's School of Music, including Stephen Chatman, Jean Coulthard, Iman Habibi, Melissa Hui, Jocelyn Morlock, and Leslie Uyeda. Themselves UBC Music alumni, Switzer and Duncan pay heartfelt tribute on the release to the land and people who've inspired them and nurtured their artistic development. Consistent with that, the sixty-four-minute recording was laid down at the Vancouver university's Roy Barnett Recital Hall in June 2022.

As deeply tied as the two are to the Canadian province, Duncan and Switzer have ventured far afield in their careers. The baritone has performed widely with some of the world's leading orchestras and established himself as a renowned singer of opera and concert repertoire. He's sung Stravinsky, Mahler, Puccini, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, and more and has appeared in multiple roles at The Metropolitan Opera. Switzer has likewise performed worldwide at some of the globe's most prestigious venues and issued with Duncan their debut album English Songs à la française on Bridge Records in 2021. The two currently live in New York's Hudson Valley, he a faculty member at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge and she an Assistant Professor at Bard College and its Conservatory of Music.

Though many years have passed since they left British Columbia, its sights, sounds, and smells left life-long imprints they can conjure at a moment's notice; that they've dedicated their sophomore album to the setting and its associated artists testifies to that connection. The songs, however, range far with respect to subject matter and source material, no better an example than the opening two by Habibi (b. 1985) that were inspired by the philosophical quatrains of the medieval Persian polymath Omar Khayyám. The combination of Duncan's commanding voice and Switzer's poised accompaniment captures the enigmatic allure of the delicate “False Morning”; by comparison, rippling piano patterns and ecstatic vocal expression intensify the impact of “The River-Lip.”

Unlike Habibi's pieces, Coulthard's (1908-2000) Three Love Songs stays within Canada's borders with music set to poetry by her UBC colleague Louis MacKay and specifically his 1948 collection The Ill-Tempered Lover. The lyrical rumination “Stand, Swaying Slightly” captivates instantly with its romantic musings; in “I Often Wonder,” Coulthard's music aligns with the idea articulated in the poem, the impossibility of knowing another's inner experience, and distills the ponderous mood of the text in “There is No Darkness” into a like-spirited musical form.

Four of the seven composers are represented by multi-part works: in addition to Three Love Songs, there's Involuntary Love Songs by Jocelyn Morlock (1969-2023), Plato's Angel by Leslie Uyeda (b. 1953), and Everything Already Lost by Jeffrey Ryan (b. 1962). The three in Morlock's deal with contrasting emotional experiences, from the denial of desire in “Thaw” to the dizzying intensity of passion and overt declaration of feeling in “Matches” and “Script,” respectively. In each case, the emotional extremes essayed by the composer are sympathetically captured in the thoughtfulness of the duo's treatments. As they do throughout the release, Duncan and Switzer attune themselves carefully to the nuances of the material, reflecting as they do the shifting winds of the narrator's inner experience. Alternately passionate and introspective as the material warrants, the partners bring the composers' songs vividly to life.

In Plato's Angel, Uyeda sets music to four thought-provoking poems from Lorna Crozier's Inventing the Hawk (1992). After stepping tremulously through “Plato's Angel,” the performers solemnly ruminate on mortality in “Angel of Roses,” cast a Stravinsky-like spell in “Twilight's Angel,” and in “Angel of the Moon” darkly brood on the indifference of Earth's only natural satellite, the poet describing it as “a bouquet of calla lilies, blooming for the funeral of the world.” At album's end, Ryan's Everything Already Lost presents four songs set to words by Jan Zwicky. “Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17” is particularly fascinating for the fact that the poem was written in response to Schumann's piano work, which was itself created in response to Beethoven's song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (to that end, Ryan begins the ten-minute setting with a piano fantasia based on the same Beethoven material Schumann quoted).The composer subtly alludes to the jazz pianist's inimitable style in the instrumental backdrop to “Bill Evans: Alone,” the song otherwise focusing on a lonely night and Zwicky coyly referencing standards interpreted by jazz artists. Elsewhere, Ryan imaginatively evokes the nocturnal chatter of crickets and katydids in “Autumn Again”; the twilight wonder of “Night Music” is beautifully rendered by Duncan and Switzer, the song perfectly matched to their gifts.

Stephen Chatman's (b. 1950) represented by one song only, but his “Something Like,” the second song in his That Love Songs set, is so lovely it registers strongly amongst the cycles. Written in 2010 and set to text by Tara Wohlberg, the song considers the subject of love from multiple angles, likening it to a sky or champagne in a vain attempt to capture its feeling. Hui (b. 1966) also appears once only, her dreamy, Debussy-esque evocation “Snowflakes” (1987) the second of three songs set to poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Somewhat surprisingly, the package's colour photos are of the couple in the studio, hermetically sealed off from the outdoors; the achromatic cover image, on the other hand, shows the two within a verdant British Columbia forest, a photo that begs for a full-colour treatment. Even in the image's desaturated form, however, the luscious character of the setting comes through as strongly as the deep and abiding affection the duo have for their Canadian home. This enriching collection reminds us repeatedly that we might leave home, but home never leaves us.

September 2023