Gabrielle Haigh & Erie Coast Cellists: Voices from the Other Side
Navona Records

In more ways than one, American composer Margi Griebling-Haigh is in good company on Voices from the Other Side. Two of her works appear alongside ones by Arvo Pärt and Heitor Villa-Lobos, and the release is a bit of a family affair too in featuring her daughter, soprano Gabrielle Haigh, on three of its five pieces. Instrumental works also appear to focus the attention exclusively on the Erie Coast Cellists, who otherwise accompany the singer on the vocal settings. Holding things together throughout the recording is conductor Steven Smith, who's been music director of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony since 2004. The cello ensemble boasts eight members, Ralph Curry, David Ellis, Khari Joyner, Julie Myers King, Robert Nicholson, Gabriel Ramos, Jeff Singler, and Richard Weiss, all of who bring impressive credentials as members of various orchestras and chamber ensembles to their shared endeavour.

While the Estonian composer Pärt (b. 1935) and Brazilian Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) require no introduction, Griebling-Haigh (b. 1960) might, at least for listeners outside the Cleveland, Ohio area where she's based. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory, Griebling-Haigh has created art songs, chamber works, and orchestral pieces and seen her work appear on Centaur, Blue Griffin, Navona, and other labels. Distinguished by melodic flair and robust rhythms, her compositions and specifically their harmonic language have invited comparison to Barber, Ravel, and Poulenc.

She has two works on the release, the three-part vocal setting Voices from the Other Side (1999), and Cantilena (1998), performed by the cellists alone. Featuring texts by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Voices from the Other Side was premiered in 2000 but, as it's been rarely presented since, benefits greatly from the version recorded here. As each of its three poems are either addressed to or from otherworldly voices, it's an arresting work lyrically with a musical design tailored to match it. On the vocal front, Haigh, who holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, acquits herself well. The nightmarish “Some Things Are Dark,” its words written late in the poet's life following the death of her husband, initiates the nineteen-minute work cryptically, with the singer's agitation set against the churning undertow of the cellos. Bowing and pizzicato combine to establish a mood of foreboding and unease, which Haigh amplifies with a bold performance. Less harrowing is “Prayer to Persephone,” in which the singer pleads with the Queen of Hades to show kindness and mercy. Its title notwithstanding, “The Curse” is perversely playful in the way it uses infectious dance rhythms as a base for text that personifies the titular device. After a striking intro that grants each cellist a separate entrance, Cantilena, an extensive thirteen-minute travelogue, morphs from its dark, melancholy beginning into a flowing expression that's by turn keening, fragile, tremulous, and elegiac. Fluidly executed cross-rhythms create animation to lighten the brooding tone, with glimmers of light emerging through the serpentine coiling of the cellos.

Pärt's Fratres (1977) is a familiar work, but hearing it in an arrangement for eight cellists isn't unwelcome. Representative of his ‘tintinnabuli' style, the work casts an always transfixing spell with its repeating chord sequences and incremental build. In liner notes, Griebling-Haigh describes how it deploys false harmonics, pizzicato and col legno effects, and an open string drone to help enhance appreciation for how it achieves its impact. Premiered twenty years ago by L'Octuor de violoncelles de Beauvais and soprano Barbara Hendricks, Pärt's L'abbé Agathon draws for inspiration from the remains of a twelfth-century leper hospital called Maladrerie Saint-Lazare near Beauvais, France and a story-line having to do with encounters between Father Agathon and a leper, who tests him several times and eventually reveals himself to be an angel sent by God. Haigh's delivery of the French text is effective (if perhaps a tad subdued), and her delicate vocal is well-supported by the sensitivity of the cellists' playing.

In contrast to Voices from the Other Side and L'abbé Agathon, countless recordings of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 exist, which makes it all but impossible to hear Haigh's performance without judging it next to others. Needless to say, hers holds up less well when considered alongside the one Dawn Upshaw delivers on White Moon, to cite one example. Better performances of a work will always exist, however, and certainly Haigh's renditions of “Ária (Cantilena)” (1938) and “Dança (Martelo)” (1945) are credible enough. The first movement is buoyed by a suitably alluring treatment from the singer and cellists when her yearning voice floats serenely above the lyrical foundation. Torrential by comparison is “Dança (Martelo),” which races like surging rapids but also slows for rapturous interludes.

A provocative mix of vocal and instrumental material by Griebling-Haigh, Pärt, and Villa-Lobos, Voices from the Other Side has value alone for presenting a recording of the titular work but warrants attention for other reasons too. The combination of soprano and cello ensemble appeals for its relative novelty and contrast, and in being a work less familiar than Fratres the inclusion of Pärt's L'abbé Agathon is welcome. Certainly the reputations of all involved are enhanced by the release.

October 2024