It’s Dylan by Way of Corigliano, McNair

Sylvia McNair surely didn’t choose to be ill last October when she was scheduled to sing a recital at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But it almost seems that way. By waiting until Sunday night to reschedule, the popular American soprano was able to include in her program the season’s most notable novelty--a song cycle, “Tambourine Man,” that John Corigliano has just written for her.

The subtitle of this peculiar set of seven songs, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered there last month, is “Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.” The “poems” are the lyrics to some of Dylan’s best-known songs. The music, however, is entirely new. And what’s more, Corigliano claims never to have listened to Dylan’s songs before composing his own.

It is a bizarre boast. The 62-year-old composer is close in age to Dylan and had an impressively cosmopolitan upbringing (his father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic during Leonard Bernstein’s years, and the orchestra recorded for Columbia, the same label as Dylan). Corigliano, moreover, is hardly an aloof Modernist--his most famous pieces include such populist favorites as the opera “The Ghost of Versailles,” a poignant symphony in remembrance of friends who died from complications of AIDS, and a flashy flute concerto for James Galway. He also scores feature films and received an Oscar two weeks ago for his music to “The Red Violin.”

But in listening to the 35-minute song cycle, which made up the entire second half of McNair’s recital, Corigliano’s claim seemed to ring true. For the vast majority of Corigliano’s generation, it would be unthinkable to divorce the words of Dylan’s early songs from his rhythms, his style of declamation, his tunes and his sound--so much were they the iconic soundtrack of the ‘60s. Nevertheless, Corigliano--in arty music that is competent, sometimes clever and sounding deeply felt--did just that.

The cycle is devised with “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a prelude and “Forever Young” (the only one of the songs written in the ‘70s) as the postlude. The five songs in between are intended to evoke a life journey. For a sense of unity, Corigliano employs a daisy-chain technique that he might have picked up from Bernstein, in which a melodic idea introduced in one song becomes a generating feature of the next.

“Mr. Tambourine Man” is introduced by moody oscillating chords in the piano, while the vocal line, rather than convey an overall sense of ballad, theatrically underscores individual words--an attention-getting musical yawn on “weariness,” some literal clanging for “jingle jangle morning,” an echoing effect on the verse-ending “dreaming.” “Clothes Line” (“innocence” in the dramatic scheme Corigliano describes in his program notes) is declamatory. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (“awareness”) is a somber reading of the text with histrionic outbursts and a portentous lingering on the word “answer.”

And so it goes with an operatic “Masters of War” (“political fury”), a convoluted “All Along the Watchtower” (“a premonition of the apocalyptic future”) and a more direct “Chimes of Freedom” (“a vision of victory of ideas”). “Forever Young” is simple and soft, with the verse a cappella and the chorus folksy.

Corigliano knew perfectly well that these new Dylan songs could prove disorienting to the average audience. But I wonder if he, personally unfazed by them, understood how that distortion might induce in some of us the sensation of vertigo and nausea that often accompanies the loss of something to which we are profoundly connected--our ideals, our loved ones, a part of our body, our youth. “Art” here has been used to rob rather than reveal essence. The simple fact is that Corigliano is no Dylan.

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Nor has the composer done McNair a favor with the songs. The versatile soprano has an admirably direct manner and even a nice way with pop tunes (she made an attractive recording of Harold Arlen songs with Andre Previn a few years back). But Corigliano, instead, exploited everything else she can do in daunting kitchen-sink vocal writing. And McNair, whose manner has taken on a new elegance of late and who was in gorgeous voice until about two-thirds of the way through the new cycle when she developed a sudden hoarseness, valiantly gave the composer all he asked for.

Earlier in the evening McNair, accompanied by pianist Ted Taylor with a waxy efficiency, sang French songs (Duparc, Messiaen, Faure, Ravel and Debussy) with a subtle, flowing beauty. And she proved a natural in Falla’s “Seven Popular Spanish Songs.” These might have seemed the perfect complement to Corigliano’s seven, but as folk-song elevated to exciting concert fare they were actually more indictment. The single encore, the coloratura Alleluia from Mozart’s “Exsultate Jubilate,” was exquisite.