Lori Laitman: Are Women People? The Songs of Lori Laitman
Acis

American composer Lori Laitman has written numerous operas, choral works, and hundreds of songs set to texts by classical and contemporary poets. Her operas include treatments of The Scarlet Letter, its libretto by David Mason, and The Three Feathers, her children's opera with librettist Dana Gioia. Another collaboration with Mason produced Vedem, a Holocaust-themed oratorio, and Laitman's calendar is packed with commissions. It's her songwriting side, however, that's the focus of Are Women People?, and a better argument for her gifts in that area would be hard to conceive. Eight works are featured, but with many of them multi-part song cycles, the release presents twenty-five tracks, all but two vocal-based. As the sixty-four-minute recording plays, one is repeatedly dazzled by her compositional versatility and imagination, and experienced as a whole, the set provides an illuminating portrait.

In recognition of her talent for crafting lyrical music for writers' words, The Journal of Singing cited “her exceptional gifts for embracing a poetic text and giving it new and deeper life through music.” Refreshingly candid about her approach, Laitman aspires to create music that expresses and amplifies the meaning of the text. The vocal line is created first, with great care taken to craft melody that will emphasize the key content in each line and set the words properly for the singer. Harmonies are added once the vocal line is complete and then instrumental accompaniment. Such a rigorous process reveals her respect for the text.

As shown by the album title and the inclusion of the eight-part work bearing its name, the topic of women's suffrage is central to the release. Its personal resonance is also intimated by album artwork that displays colour-tinted photographs of women from Laitman's family. But Are Women People? also ranges beyond that theme, as key as it is. There are two duets for violin and piano, plus song cycles set to the poetry of Gioia, Margaret Atwood, Francis Bourdillon, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Eugenio Montale, and Christina Rossetti. A sterling array of performers brings the material to life: sopranos Nicole Cabell and Maureen McKay, baritone Daniel Belcher, tenor Kyle Knapp, the Fourth Coast Ensemble, violinist Tarn Travers, and pianists Andrew Rosenblum, Maria Sumareva, and Laitman herself. Indicative of the calibre of the personnel involved, many of the participants are award winners and associated with some of the world's greatest opera companies.

McKay and Rosenblum treat Orange Afternoon Lover to a bravura performance, with her assured execution alternating between soaring declamation and hushed intimacy. Representative of the thoughtfulness with which Laitman conceives music for a text, in “Against Still Life” she deploys a circular motif in the accompaniment that's suggestive of—what else?—the shape of an orange. In addition, harmonies, textures, and rhythms are used to mirror the emotions of Atwood's words, and the melody line adheres to the poem's natural rhythms. The excitement of new love is intimated by rapid piano figures at the beginning of “I Was Reading a Scientific Article,” with slower, dreamier sections thereafter suggesting a more languorous consideration of love.

Wit and irreverence mark the titular work, which sets rousing music to wry texts by New York Tribune writer Alice Duer Miller (whose column “Are Women People?” ran from 1914-17), an 1894 speech by suffragist Susan B. Anthony, and the 19th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. Though it's in keeping with the satirical character of Miller's writing, the music's jubilant tone and early 20th-century parlour style belies the seriousness of the topic, which comes to the fore in the other texts. Adding considerably to the presentation is the barbershop-like delivery of Fourth Coast Ensemble, with their four voices accompanied by Rosenblum and Sumareva on pianos for much of it. In keeping with the work's theme, Laitman arranges many a male and female voice so that they seem pitted against one another.

The Montale poems selected for Dark Spring relate to the anguish of a failed romance. Performed by Knapp with Rosenblum, the four-part song cycle progresses from the downtrodden “The Flower on the Mountainside” to the yearning expressiveness of “The Spirit,” desperation of “Scissors, Don't Cut Away,” and eventual despair of “You Know This” and its crushing last line, “Now hell is certain.” Set to poems by Browning, Dickinson, Bourdillon, and Rossetti, Days and Nights showcases Cabell's remarkable soprano in a six-part song cycle that extends from the supplicating “Along with Me” (“Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be…”) and plaintive “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (“Yet the light of a whole life dies / When love is done”) to the playful, tango-inflected “They Might Not Need Me” and “Wild Nights.” Two single-movement songs conclude the release, the first featuring the composer herself on piano alongside soprano McKay for the openhearted “Marriage of Many Years,” which Laitman created as a birthday gift for her husband, and “The Treasure Song,” which presents Belcher and Rosenblum performing a short aria from the opera The Three Feathers.

Laitman was wise to include the lyrical instrumental duets “Lullaby” and “Distant Lyghts” (both performed by Travers and Rosenblum), not only because they're lovely in their own right but because they provide a pleasing respite from the vocal presentation. She's anything but a reserved minimalist, as the theatricality of the settings repeatedly shows, and many a song brims with an infectious joie de vivre that makes clear why her music is embraced so fervently. Considering the number of songs she's written, the release constitutes a small sampling, yet the marvelous music that is presented enables a clear impression of Laitman's remarkable range and command to form.

August 2021