Lee Kesselman: Would That Loving Were Enough
Blue Griffin Records

Multiple facets of Lee R. Kesselman's music are highlighted in this diverse collection splendidly performed by HAVEN members Lindsay Kesselman (soprano), Kimberly Cole Luevano (clarinet), and Midori Koga (piano). There are lyrical chamber classic pieces but also a re-imagining of a Handel aria, songs that wouldn't sound out of place on a Broadway stage, and even a Gershwin treatment. The album also reflects Kesselman's love of Japanese music and poetry in featuring his arrangement of the popular Japanese folksong Sakura and his own composition Ashes & Dreams, which alternates between Japanese texts of haiku and waka. Even though Kesselman's created over 100 choral works, two chamber operas, and art songs and chamber works for solo voice, Would That Loving Were Enough is the first album devoted to his music; regardless, it speaks powerfully on behalf of his talents and is also something of a family affair in featuring his daughter Lindsay.

That the release would emphasize vocal works is consistent with Kesselman's background. He was Director of Choral Activities at the College of DuPage in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn from 1981 until 2022, and he also was the founder and Music Director of the professional choral ensemble New Classic Singers. That the material would delve into the realms of Japanese folksong and theatrical material is something one might less anticipate, however. His interest in the former is asserted immediately when the album begins with Sakura, titled after Japan's cherry blossom, and Kesselman's own eight-part Ashes & Dreams. In having such a short-life span, the cherry blossom acts as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of life, transience in this case perhaps accentuating its exquisite beauty. A mood of loneliness is set by opening the piece with an unaccompanied clarinet before the vocalist and piano enter, their own solemn expressions marked by tenderness and longing.

Different poets' texts were set to Kesselman's music for Ashes & Dreams, with the even-numbered songs (the thirty-one-syllable, five-lined waka) credited anonymously to women and the odd-numbered (the familiar seventeen-syllable haiku) to credited male authors. The poems are different structurally but also in terms of content, as the haiku often explains or defines emotions and the waka is more intent on capturing or expressing them. Naturally, Kesselman designed his musical expression to accord with the poetic content in each case. After an instrumental prelude initiates the work with clarinet gestures calling to mind Philip Glass (the concluding “Nishi No Sora E” revisits the material with vocals added), “Wakaishu Ya” establishes the poetic character of the work with Lindsay's careful enunciation of the Japanese text. Less emotionally constrained are the expressive waka songs “Omoitsusu,” “Kagiri Naki,” and “Yume Ni Dani.”

Cellist Allison Rich replaces Luevano in Piangerò, which stems from the Italian opera Giulio Cesare by Handel and librettist Nicola Francesco Haym and was re-imagined by Kesselman in 2012. It's sung by Cleopatra, who's been imprisoned by her brother Tolomeo for plotting with the now-apparently-drowned Caesar, and in the aria the Queen of Egypt reflects on the hand fate has dealt her and how she will return to haunt her brother after her death. In contrast to the reserved solemnity of the opening settings, Piangerò invites intense outpourings of emotion, be it anguish, desperation, or anger, from all three performers. With Make Me a Willow Cabin, Kesselman shifts his attention to Shakespeare by basing the work on Viola's speech in Twelfth Night. In the dramatic scene, Viola, disguised as Cesario, carries a message of love from Orsino to Olivia but chooses to set aside the prepared message and instead passionately speaks of the deep devotion and surrender she imagines true love entails. Lindsay's vibrato-intense delivery sometimes recalls Dawn Upshaw during this emotionally tempestuous piece, not the only time on the album that happens.

For the concert aria How I Hate This Room, Kesselman set music to lyrics by James Tucker after Charlotte Perkins Gilman from her 1892 novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” (the piece is drawn from an opera-in-progress by Kesselman and Tucker). In simplest terms, the story has to do with a woman confined by her husband and doctor to a country rest cure for her “nervous condition” and the secret journal she writes during her stay within the bedroom and its yellow-patterned wallpaper. With cello again in place of clarinet, the material moves from emphatic disgust for her surroundings (“The pattern is torture!”) to imaginings of a feminine altar-ego behind the wallpaper as she descends into madness.

That Upshaw connection surfaces perhaps even more vividly when the album turns its attention to its more theatrical pieces, the four-part Would That Loving Were Enough and Gershwin cover (in the ‘90s Upshaw memorably issued her own theatre-themed albums I Wish It So and Songs of Rodgers & Hart). The titular work examines a relationship from four angles, from the lubricated flair of “I Prefer a Wine of Some Complexity” and romantic lyricism of “You Lie A-Bed” to the forlorn “I Wish That Loving Were Enough” and cheeky “That's A Wrap.” Written by George Gershwin in 1922 for the Broadway musical George White's Scandals, “I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise” famously appeared in the 1951 American musical An American in Paris and takes the album out on a beguiling wave of joy and jubilation. As mentioned, Would That Loving Were Enough is apparently the first album to present Kesselman's music, despite the substantial body of work he's created. That it took so long for it be recorded is mystifying when his material has been performed and presented by a large number of instrumental and vocal ensembles. His opera The Bremen Town Musicians, for example, has been performed over 350 times for schoolchildren in different states. The release of Would That Loving Were Enough might be considered, then, the first step towards righting that wrong.

January 2025