Ben Moore: Gathering
Delos

There's so much to like about this collection of songs by Ben Moore (b. 1960), it's hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the material itself, twenty-two songs that span the spectrum of emotional experience with dignity and poise. The American composer's music has been called “gorgeously lyrical” (The New York Times) and commended for its “romantic sweep” (Opera News), and many a song on Gathering exemplifies those qualities, plus a great deal more. Also adding to the release's appeal is the structural approach adopted. Songs are grouped into five sections, the first featuring ones set to Romantic poetry and the second to twentieth-century texts. Whereas the third, “Toward Acceptance,” hits hard in a song describing a young gay man grappling with the suicide of his gay uncle, the fourth brings levity in presenting a sampling of Moore's theatre and cabaret songs and the fifth uplift in its songs of hope. Finally, helping to distinguish Moore's music is a stellar cast of singers, all of them wholly sympathetic to the composer's vision and supported wonderfully by pianist Brian Zeger, Moore's husband. Any composer would be thrilled to have Isabel Leonard, Liz Callaway, Matthew Polenzani, Janai Brugger, Michael Kelly, Alexander Gemignani, and Joseph Lattanzi in their corner.

Moore's output includes more than art songs, incidentally. He's composed choral works, chamber music, and three acclaimed operas, Enemies, a Love Story, and the youth operas Odyssey and Robin Hood. Dear Theo, Moore's first Delos album, comprises three song cycles: the title work, based on the letters of Vincent van Gogh; So Free Am I, set to poems by women; and Ode to a Nightingale, a treatment of the well-known Keats poem. A graduate of both Hamilton College and The Parsons School of Design, Moore's a painter of some distinction too, as shown by the portraits and landscapes posted at his website.

Though the text for “Alas! This is Not What I thought Life Was” was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley around 1818, its words about hate and suffering spoke to Moore in light of George Floyd's murder (for “A Holy Place,” the composer went even further back by setting music to words by Sappho from 2600 years ago). Given a heartfelt reading by soprano Brugger, the dramatic song makes for a powerful entry-point to the sixty-seven-minute recording. The first presentation of Moore's lyrical side arrives with “Lullaby,” adapted from Christina Rossetti's 1883 poem “Lullaby, Oh, Lullaby!” and delivered poignantly by mezzo-soprano Leonard.

Baritone Lattanzi gives stirring voice to “Requiem,” Moore's setting of words by Robert Louis Stevenson that recount the protagonist's stoical acceptance of death (“Under the wide and starry sky / Dig the grave and let me die”). A wistful tone pervades the opening section's last two songs, “Where are the songs of spring?” and “Ah, happy, happy boughs,” moving realizations by Moore of respective stanzas from Keats's “To Autumn” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and rendered affectingly by tenor Polenzani.

Leonard inaugurates the second section with a gorgeous performance in “I Travel as a Phantom Now,” the impact of its words by Thomas Hardy amplified by the elegiac character of the music. As intimated by its title, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” a spirited setting of material by W. B. Yeats that's sung with gusto by Brugger, is markedly different in tone from the Hardy treatment. Whereas most of the songs are set to poems, the graceful “Between the Lights” changes things up by having an impassioned Brugger sing a prose excerpt from Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

At the album's centre, the “Toward Acceptance” section is arguably the collection's most moving for the yearning expressed in its five songs. Lattanzi pairs with Callaway for the first two, “And Another Song Comes On” and “Play My Song,” both from the cycle And Another Song Comes On and featuring words by Mark Campbell. Knowing that the lyrics were inspired by the playlist on the Stonewall bar's jukebox on the night of the 1969 uprising makes the songs resonate all the more strongly. Following them are two from Love Remained, a 2014 cycle commissioned in support of LGBTQ youth, one of them, “Uncle Ronnie,” featuring text Moore adopted from a letter and video by Randy Robert. In his sincere reading, baritone Kelly brings the song vividly to life (“I would have held you in my arms if I could / You and I – we had everything in common”), its sorrow intensified by the fact that the nephew was but seven years old when his uncle died.

After Callaway's sensitively nuanced vocal maximizes the punch of “Where Has Summer Gone?,” the fourth section presents theatrical songs from Moore's Henry and Company, the lively “Goodbye Old Centerville” and vulnerable “Were I to Touch You,” and one inspired by Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the rousing “Love and I,” all three featuring lyrics by Moore and delivered with passion and flair by tenor Gemignani. The composer smartly caps the collection with stirring expressions of hope, with Callaway's beautiful vocal turns in the lilting “A Moment Like This” and “See How a Flower Blossoms” inducing chills and Leonard's in “On Music” guiding the set to a triumphant close—“Let music fill your heart” indeed.

September 2022