Rediscovering Pleasures of the American Art Song

The American art song, as represented by such major practitioners as Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Paul Bowles and Leonard Bernstein--the purported wonders of Ned Rorem utterly elude this listener--remains hugely undervalued, a point brought home most emphatically by several recent recordings.

The best known of Copland’s songs are, like the greater part of his orchestral output, conduits for music he assimilated and transformed rather than created: the two sets (five songs each) of “Old American Songs” (1950-1952), his sources being 19th-Century minstrel, gospel, hymn and nursery tunes.

What might be presumed--by a listener brought up in the European art-song tradition--to be delightful in the folkish originals becomes something akin to sublime in Copland’s arrangements. They have become pillars of the American recitalist’s repertory.

While the performances are hardly to be despised, a less sumptuous instrument--or perhaps a less sumptuously employed one--than Samuel Ramey’s justifiedly celebrated bass would have been welcome in both sets, recently released on the British Argo label (433 027).

The simpler music--say the slow, ineffably tender “Long Time Ago”--is crushed by a big voice that, furthermore, acquires a distinct wobble under the combined pressure of long, low-lying phrases and soft dynamics.

What Ramey does--and possesses--is on such a grand scale that it’s impossible not to notice the flaws in his delivery.

Nothing but praise, however, for his piano partner, Warren Jones, who brings crackling rhythmicality and invariably apt pacing to the songs. Just listen to the way he punches out “The Dodger,” or the rubatoed wit with which he underlines Ramey’s lively delivery of “I bought me a cat.”

Ten songs by Charles Ives, from the same performers, form the terrific coupling.

Ives shows in his brief compositions a fine, modern madness delightfully contrasted to Copland’s open-faced populism. Compare the two composers’ settings of “Simple Gifts,” both included here, and the point is made.

Ives hurls his rowdy humor in your face with the wacky ballad “Charlie Rutlage,” to lyrics by one D. J. O’Malley about the eponymous “good cowpuncher’s” demise, replete with maniacally shouted (presumably by pianist Jones) “whoopee-ti-yi-yos” and “git along little dogies.” And how can one resist “The Circus Band,” with its keys clashing to evoke the marchers stepping on each others’ feet--and each other’s tunes?

Again, Ramey’s singing is imposing, sometimes too grandly operatic (and occasionally shaky) but always committed. And Jones remains a masterful ally without hiding his own bright talents.

Copland’s “Old American Songs” assume a more pop-ish aspect in the composer’s own orchestrations. Both sets, incidentally, have California origins in this guise: The first was given its premiere by William Warfield and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Alfred Wallenstein in 1955; the second by Grace Bumbry, with the composer conducting, at the 1958 Ojai Festival.

Bruce Hubbard, the young baritone who sang these songs so winningly under John Mauceri at the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s recent debut, is the soloist as well in a recording with Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (EMI Classics/Angel 54282).

Hubbard’s singing here, in contrast to his Bowl work, is fussily artsy, with lavish falsettos and a use of head voice more appropriate to Debussyan decadence than to Copland’s healthy All-Americanism.

The songs are part of a Copland program otherwise devoted to reissues: the rather glum Leonard Slatkin/Saint Louis Symphony “Rodeo”; the final movement of the Third Symphony, handsomely delivered by Eduardo Mata and the Dallas Symphony, and a tensely atmospheric “Quiet City” from the New York Chamber Symphony under Gerard Schwarz.

Simplicity of a more sophisticated sort than that found in the disingenuous “Old American Songs” marks Copland’s roughly contemporaneous “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Dickinson’s striking conciseness is aptly rendered by Copland, with musical strokes as plain and pointed as the verses themselves.

The 12 miniatures are delivered with eloquent simplicity by baritone Sanford Sylvan, a charter member of the Peter Sellars repertory company, and pianist David Breitman (Elektra Nonesuch 79259).

Their recital also includes Theodore Chanler’s wispy, Faure-inspired “Eight Epitaphs” (1937) to poems of Walter de la Mare, and Samuel Barber’s subtly evocative “Hermit Songs” to modern translations of medieval Irish lyrics.