Alex Weiser: and all the days were purple
Cantaloupe Music
Presented with the words “Jewish music,” you might immediately think of klezmer or John Zorn's Masada. Yet while Alex Weiser's poignant song cycle and all the days were purple draws heavily from Jewish culture and Yiddish writing in particular, it stakes out startlingly original ground far removed from those touchstones. In this case, Yiddish poetry has been refracted through the prism of the NYC-based classical composer's sensibility, the result an arresting hybrid. As noted by Bang on a Can co-artistic director Michael Gordon, with this project Weiser “captures the haunting beauty of Yiddish poetry and gives it a modern cosmopolitan twist that reflects his New York roots.”
The album's half-hour title piece includes two instrumental movements and six featuring lyrics drawn from Yiddish and English poems by Anna Margolin, Edward Hirsch, Rachel Korn, and Abraham Sutzkever (the title comes from a line in the opening part by Margolin, “And all the days were purple, and all were hard”). Complementing and all the days were purple, whose lyrics encompass love, longing, beauty, memory, and mortality, is the single-movement Three Epitaphs, a fourteen-minute setting featuring lines about life and love by Williams Carlos Williams, Seikilos, and Emily Dickinson. With such themes the focus, the tone of the musical presentation is not surprisingly meditative, wistful, and devotional, the composer himself commenting that “(i)n a way these poems and songs are meant almost as replacements for prayers.”
Music of such sensitivity and delicacy demands performances of equivalent character, and in that regard soprano Eliza Bagg (voice), Lee Dionne (piano), Maya Bennardo (violin), Hannah Levinson (viola), Hannah Collins (cello) and Mike Compitello (percussion) rise to the occasion magnificently. As the lone singer, a great deal rides on Bagg's shoulders, but she's superb in conveying the emotional power of Weiser's material yet does so with carefully calibrated restraint and poise.
In the song cycle's “My Joy,” the graceful arc of her hushed delivery blends beautifully with piano chords and the strings' bowed textures, the peak moment the high note the singer nails so stirringly midway through. Korn's “Longing” juxtaposes a coolly controlled Bagg with aggressively ascending string and piano figures. The delicate treatment of Sutzkever's peaceful “Poetry,” on the other hand, exudes a serenity whose powerful effect is achieved using contrary means. At cycle's end, Margolin's “We Went Through the Days” reflects triumphantly on challenges tackled and met (“We went through the days as through storm-tossed gardens / Blossoming, maturing; mastering the game of life and death”). In dramatic meditations of percussion, piano, and strings, the instrumental movements show that absent a vocal dimension Weiser's music still communicates emotion emphatically.
After an extended instrumental intro, Three Epitaphs perpetuates the elegiac tone of the title piece with Bagg giving tender voice to words by Williams (“Love is a young green willow / Shimmering at the bare wood's edge”), Seikilos (“Life exists only a short while / And time demands its toll”), and Dickinson (“After a hundred years / Nobody knows the place, — / Agony, that enacted there, / Motionless as peace”). Were the album's two works to be performed live with as much conviction as they are here, one imagines the audience would respond rapturously to the material, a reaction wholly unlike the kind of respectful appreciation with which some new works are met. The heartfelt music on and all the days were purple communicates with a visceral immediacy that likely would invite a live response as immediate.June 2019