David Leisner: Letter to the World
Azica Records

While David Leisner is recognized as a prize-winning guitarist—American Record Guide deemed him “among the finest guitarists of all time” and a recent recording of Die Schöne Müllerin saw Franz Schubert's song cycle re-imagined for baritone Michael Kelly and Leisner's guitar—Letter to the World emphasizes his formidable talents as a composer of vocal chamber music. Four works are presented spanning different parts of his career, two from the ‘80s, one from 2002, and the other 2011. Whereas the six-part Simple Songs reunites him with Kelly, the others feature different arrangements and personnel: Das Wunderbare Wesen couples Kelly with cellist Raman Ramakrishnan, Confiding soprano Katherine Whyte with pianist Lenore Fishman Davis, and the single-movement Of Darkness and Light tenor Andrew Fuchs, violinist Sarah Whitney, oboist Scott Bartucca, and pianist Dimitri Dover. Recorded in June 2021 at Mount Vernon's Oktaven Audio, the sixty-four-minute collection makes a compelling argument for Leisner as a composer of art songs and vocal suites.

For the ten-song suite Confiding (1985-86), Leisner sequenced poems by Emily Dickinson, Gene Scaramellino, Elissa Ely, and Emily Brontë to document stages in a couple's relationship and probing self-examinations by one of the partners. In true art song tradition, Leisner takes his cue from the emotional tone of the texts in crafting the music, with Dickinson's “Savior! I've no one else to tell” suitably yearning, “Ample Make This Bed” reverent, “Wild Nights” ecstatic, and Brontë's “Love and Friendship” playful. Throughout the half-hour performance, Whyte and Davis navigate the contrasting emotional terrain with authority and give vivid expression to Leisner's oft-lyrical writing. His melodic gifts are well-accounted for in elegant settings of Scaramellino's “Signal” and Dickinson's “This is my letter to the World” and the sincerity with which the protagonist's longings are articulated in Brontë's “To Imagination.”

Set to excerpts of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Das Wunderbare Wesen (The Miraculous Essence) comprises five pieces Kelly sings in German with Ramakrishnan accompanying. Unlike Confiding, Das Wunderbare Wesen less originates from the vocal melody and more the cello part. A repeating pattern in the instrument, for example, is the seed in “Der Sinn” (The Tao) from which the singer's vocal line develops. Even so, Leisner again fashions the song's character in accordance with the text, such that the fleeting “Dreissig Speicher” (Thirty spokes) is feverish and “Der Mensch” (Man) ponderous in its ruminations on mortality. Kelly emotes powerfully as he attunes his delivery to the essence of the song, and the versatile Ramakrishnan's a fully engaged partner in the realization. Simple Songs (1982) returns us to Dickinson with six pieces performed by Kelly and the composer on guitar. Titled with a single word (“Madness,” “Humility,” etc.), each song tackles its topic directly and with brevity, the entire work but nine minutes in total. The pairing of the singer with Leisner's guitar proves refreshing, especially when the latter's fingerpicking is deftly executed and complements Kelly's delivery so effectively.

A beautiful setting of text by American poet Wendell Berry, Of Darkness and Light concludes the recording on a poignant high. For eleven minutes, Fuchs' tenor soars across a graceful chamber backdrop of violin, oboe, and piano, the work actually a set of five songs assembled into a single large movement. After casting a spell with intertwining instrumental phrases, the material turns elegiac when Fuchs enters, plunges even deeper during the meditative second part, and then confronts despair with the awareness that, for one's children, terrors will come. Berry's words oscillate between hope and despair, and Leisner found himself gravitating to them when the Stones River Players at Middle Tennessee State University commissioned a work from him the year following 9/11. Fear and uncertainty for what the future holds permeate the work's closing section (“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be…”), yet nature, in all its restorative power, brings solace and hope, however fragile the latter might be.

Having premiered works by David Del Tredici, Virgil Thomson, Philip Glass, Peter Sculthorpe, Osvaldo Golijov, and others, Leisner has been justly celebrated for expanding the guitar repertoire. However, Letter to the World indicates that he deserves as rightful a place amongst vocal composers when its works are as accomplished as they are. Certainly the contributions of his collaborators do much to support that impression, but it's the material he's given them to perform that testifies to his abilities in the vocal music realm. That's especially the case when all four exemplify arresting melodic character, emotional depth, and dramatic sweep.

May 2023