Palaver Strings: Ready or Not
Azica Records

It's easy enough to guess the theme driving Palaver Strings' new album from its title, but text on the inner sleeve makes it crystal clear: “women's creative visions have always been here, whether the concert hall was ready, or not.” Recent years have seen performers bring greater attention to underrepresented figures such as Clara Schumann and Florence Price; Palaver Strings now does its part to celebrate the diverse material female composers have produced, then and now. As a term, “Palaver hut” refers to a traditional setting used for discussion and conflict resolution, which makes it an apt name choice for a musician-led ensemble that similarly aspires to reach creative agreement about its own musical choices.

Founded in 2014 and operating out of Portland, the forward-thinking Palaver Strings is not, as the album cover might suggest, a quartet but on this recording seventeen string voices strong, with mezzo-soprano Sophie Michaux listed too. She graces Lagrime mie, a madrigal composed by Barbara Strozzi (1619-77), but the recording's otherwise instrumental. It begins on a high with the three-movement Concerto for String Orchestra by Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-69) and also features Fear the Lamb by Chicago-based Akenya Seymour (b.1992) and Treehouse/Jig for John #2/Fore Street, a medley of fiddle tunes by Portland-based Liz Knowles and Palaver's own Elizabeth Moore (b. 1989); rounding out the release is Non può il mio cuore, a lovely (though short at two minutes) four-voice setting by Venetian composer Maddalena Casulana (c. 1544-90). As even that simple overview attests, Ready or Not ranges widely, both stylistically and temporally.

Written in 1948 and hailed as a masterpiece, Bacewicz's Concerto for String Orchestra sounds as vital in the ensemble's stellar rendering as the day it was born. Beginning with agitated, full-bodied flourishes, the material pushes through its “Allegro” with the aggressiveness and lucidity of Bartók's Divertimento for Strings (1939). After sinuous melodies, syncopated rhythms, and dissonant harmonies imbue the opening movement with power and mystery, the “Andante” seduces as effectively using different means. Luscious string harmonies and haunting figures make the central movement as stirring as the first, while the vivacious “Vivo” resolves the work on a carefree and buoyant note.

Strozzi's Lagrime mie shifts the tone dramatically in adding Michaux to the mix. Graceful and lilting, the ten-minute madrigal is set to a poem by Pietro Dolfino that recounts a speaker's separation from his beloved, and its suitably lamenting character is effectively conveyed by Michaux in the expressive longing of her vocal. Leaping centuries ahead, Seymour's elegiac Fear the Lamb (2019) explores the life and death of Emmett Till in three contrasting movements. From the delectable, jazz-sweetened swing of “Bobo's Blues” to “Gorgeous and Gallant / Gory and Galvanizing,” which juxtaposes a dreamy evocation of the natural beauty of Mississippi and the lynching of Till as a teenager, and the lyrical, gospel-tinged “Elegy for Emmett Louis Till,” the piece travels far in fourteen minutes. One final dramatic change arrives with the advent of Treehouse/Jig for John #2/Fore Street by Knowles and Moore. Each part's again different from the others, Treehouse a dignified waltz Moore wrote as a birthday gift for her father, and Knowles' Jig for John #2 and Moore's Fore Street uplifting and celebratory. As the recording so convincingly illustrates, the ensemble's as locked in delivering an Irish jig as giving voice to the eloquent lamentations of Fear the Lamb.

April 2022