INDOMITABLE ART SONGS

Recitals of art songs are fewer and further between than ever. Not only in benighted Los Angeles but as well in New York and London or any other cultural capital. And, outside festival time, you can’t give away a Lieder recital in the German-speaking world these days.

Yet the recordings continue to come. Would that be the case if no one were buying them? And are they being bought by people not interested in song recitals? The questions are no less puzzling for being rhetorical.

Soprano Lucia Popp is among the brave artists staking their reputations on a revival of audience interest in the art song. In her third such recorded recital in as many years (Angel DC-38129), Popp presents us with a wide-ranging program of Schubert songs, including such staples as “An Sylvia,” “Die Forelle,” and “Die junge Nonne.” She applies her astute artistry as well to a dozen lesser-known and no less deserving items, among them “An mein Herz,” “Die Rose,” “Fuelle der Liebe” and “Der Fluss.”

In spite of an occasionally intrusive vibrato, Popp sings the music with relaxed charm, clear enunciation and obvious affection. Her elegant, strongly supportive collaborator at the piano is Irwin Gage.

Sweden’s Hakan Hagegard brings his refined instincts and virile baritone to a program of Wolf and Strauss songs, fluently accompanied by Thomas Schuback (RCA ARC1-5320).

The Strauss side mixes the familiar--”Allerseelen,” “Heimliche Aufforderung,” “Die Nacht”--with the rarely encountered, including the glittering “Anbetung” and wry “Fuer fuenfzehn Pfennige.”

The Wolf side contains nine familiar masterpieces, including “Der Gaertner,” “Um Mitternacht” and “An eine Aeolsharfe.”

Janet Baker has been doing--and recording--this repertory for a quarter century. Her latest venture is a program of early Mahler songs (Hyperion A66100) with the admirable pianist Geoffrey Parsons.

The material is, with the exception of the familiar “Songs of a Wayfarer,” which sound rather thin with piano in place of the usual orchestral accompaniment, unjustly neglected. The songs are for the most part folk-poem inspired and gorgeously lyrical, with the spirit of Schumann occasionally popping in for a visit, yet full of odd modulations and harmonic twists.

The Baker mezzo-soprano has, inevitably, lost some of its bloom with the passage of time. Yet it remains a warmly communicative instrument allied to a towering musical intelligence.

Two songs are claimed as recording premieres: “Winterlied” and “Der Lenz,” to Mahler’s own texts. Both are compelling, in a high-flown, exuberantly youthful way, and it would be difficult to imagine performances more accomplished than Baker’s.

America had a masterful composer of art songs in Charles Ives, who showed his less feisty side in such lyric gems as “Songs My Mother Taught Me” (to the same text as Dvorak’s well-known song), “Dreams,” “Two Little Flowers,” “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” The ear-stretching Ives makes his presence felt in “Like a Sick Eagle,” “The Housatonic and Stockbridge,” “1,2,3” and the incredible “Charlie Rutlage.”

These and 18 other Ives songs comprise a stunning program by American soprano Roberta Alexander and Dutch pianist Tan Crone (Etcetera ETC 1020).

Alexander sings with effortless, floating purity when that quality is called for. She can also punch out a dramatic line forcefully without losing vocal solidity, while projecting the texts--many of them Ives’ own--with the clarity and thrust of a first-rate diseuse.

Aaron Copland’s arrangements of “Old American Songs” are familiar in their settings for voice and small orchestra. Their relationship to mainstream Romantic art songs is, however, more clearly discernible in the original, piano-accompanied versions, beautifully sung and played by baritone William Parker and pianist William Huckaby for the tiny Centaur label out of Baton Rouge, La. (CRC 1011).

Eight of these superb pieces--coupled with a like number of Brahms songs--are heard, including “Simple Gifts” (employed earlier in “Appalachian Spring”), “Long Time Ago,” and “The Little Horses.” The tunes may not have been invented by Copland but he left his personal stamp on the present arrangements as surely as the melodies--all from the 19th century--have made a central contribution to the Copland idiom.

Mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani and pianist Gilbert Kalish are teamed in three core components of the French art song repertory: Debussy’s “Chansons de Bilitis” and “Fetes Galantes” and the “Histoires Naturelles” of Ravel (Nonesuch 78025).

DeGaetani sings the notes flawlessly and Kalish is a fabulous technician. But the sensuousness of Debussy’s settings of Pierre Loys and Verlaine is barely suggested; nor is there more than a fleeting hint projected of the quirky humor in Ravel’s musical translation of the clever Jules Renard bestiary in these bloodless readings.