Eric Ferring: No Choice But Love: Songs of the LGBTQ+ Community
Lexicon Classics

With No Choice But Love, American tenor Eric Ferring and his longtime accompanist, pianist Madeline Slettedahl, have created something of remarkable importance and, ideally, consequence. The double-album collection features works that reference, directly and indirectly, the LGBTQ+ community, its members' experiences and perspectives, and the profound challenges they face. It is a remarkable collection, not only for the statement it makes but for its glorious music and the duo's illuminating treatments. Self-declared members of the community, the two give themselves completely to the material, the tenor elevating the songs with his passionate, resonant voice and she supporting him with the greatest sensitivity.

Recorded at WMFT Studios in Chicago, the ninety-minute set pairs works by some of today's greatest living composers, among them Ben Moore, Jake Heggie, Jennifer Higdon, and Ricky Ian Gordon, with other pieces by Manuel de Falla, Francis Poulenc, Ethel Smyth, and Benjamin Britten. Ferring and Slettedahl are well-qualified to take on the assignment. Boasting a range that extends from early bel canto repertoire to contemporary opera roles, the Dubuque, Iowa native and graduate of Drake University and The Boston Conservatory has sung in Turandot (Pong), The Magic Flute (Tamino), and Lucia di Lammermoor (Arturo), and been the recipient of numerous awards. Slettedahl, a sought-after accompanist and recitalist, is a current member of the Houston Grand Opera staff, has performed with many of today's leading opera singers, and is a graduate of Rice University and Western Washington University.

As integral as each selection is, there's no question Moore's material carries special significance, the fact that it both opens and closes the release signifying as much. Presented here in the world premiere recording of a new version for tenor, his Love Remained (2011) distills many of the projects's themes into a lyrical four-part song cycle, while the album ends with the 2021-commissioned title work. The message directed by Fort Worth city councilman Joel Burns to teens in an unforgettable 2010 speech where he came out publicly is relayed in its title, “Hold On,” and movingly in lyrics, derived from the speech, that stress that while life for those grappling with their identity can be unbearable, “it gets better, it gets much better.” “Uncle Ronnie” poignantly recounts the love Randy Robert Potts had as a child for his late gay uncle, Ronald Roberts, the son of American television evangelist Oral Roberts. The text for “Love Remained” came from baritone Michael Kelly, the cycle's dedicatee and first performer, and brings to life the experience of coming out to his brother. The cycle concludes with “Hope,” which honours Harvey Milk by incorporating excerpts from his 1978 “Hope Speech” into a stirring, uplifting expression.

“Preludios” and “Oración de las madres que tienen a sus hijos en brazos” (Prayer of the mothers who hold their sons in their arms) by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), a closeted gay man, are memorable for the magnificent vocal performances Ferring delivers and the responsive backing his collaborator provides. Playful and irreverent, Heggie's Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc (2008) explores friendships between the gay composer and four close friends: harpsichordist Wanda Landowska; Poulenc's recital partner, baritone Pierre Bernac; Raymonde Linossier, a young woman to whom he proposed marriage; and Surrealist poet Paul Eluard. Poulenc himself is represented by the emotionally expansive nine-song cycle, Tel jour, telle nuit (1937), set to nine Eluard poems and, like the de Falla selections, capturing the splendour of Ferring singing in a non-English tongue (see “Une herbe pauvre” and “Nous avons fait la nuit” for two excellent illustrations) and the authority of his vocal command.

Smyth's “On the Road” (1913) inaugurates the second disc with a defiantly toned, march-driven setting, after which Higdon's “Lilacs” (2014) uses text from Whitman's “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” to fashion an eloquent elegy to Lincoln without once mentioning his name. Also appearing is the first of Britten's five Canticles, “My beloved is mine and I am his” (1947), its inclusion honouring the British composer and, by extension, his life partner, tenor Peter Pears.

His music drawing from his experience as a gay African-Mexican-American man, Willie Alexander III is represented by “Sure On This Shining Night” (2021), its ten lines by James Agee evoking the image of an elderly man strolling through the woods and reflecting on the ups and downs of his life. For her lyrical two-part work To Digte af Tove Ditlevsen (2010), Mexican-American transgender composer Mari Esabel Valverde set two poems by the Danish writer, whose turbulent life ended by suicide in 1976. As the recording moves towards its final songs, the spotlight turns to Ricky Ian Gordon, represented by two songs from 1993's ten-song cycle Genius Child (its texts by Langston Hughes), and finally to Moore. Whereas Gordon's “Prayer” is suitably supplicating, his theatrical “Joy” is as appropriately pitched in tone to its title. For “No Choice But Love,” Moore, commissioned by Ferring, set a poem by Jamaican-American Terrence Chin-Loy about embracing love in its many forms to music that's as affirming as well as emblematic of the composer's rapturous side.

November 2022