Glass' 'Book of Longing' lives up to hype

Melissa Haneline

Philip Glass rehearses "Book of Longing" based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen at Sottile Theatre Wednesday.

Lyrically beautiful, affecting work is more conservative than than his other recent pieces

Phillip Glass' "The Book of Longing" has enjoyed unofficial status as the Festival's main event, at least partly because of the ubiquitous presence of its composer's face. I'm pleased to report that the advance hype was justified.

Glass' new work, heard here in its American premiere, is a lyrically beautiful and affecting song cycle with theatrical trappings. It's also abundant evidence of the composer's ever-growing gift for setting texts sensitively.

In this case, the texts are the work of the celebrated Canadian poet/singer-songwriter/artist Leonard Cohen, whose artwork appears as a background to the stage setting of this production. Cohen's verses are plain-spoken, emotionally candid, and often humorous. Glass has stated that his intention in setting them to music was to make sure the words were projected as clearly as possible.

He has succeeded in this. Thanks to ingratiating, vocally sympathetic melodies that suit the natural rhythms of the words, a quartet of committed, outstanding singers, plus skillful sound design, the lyrics landed with perfect clarity.

Rhythmically and harmonically, the piece is more conservative than other recent Glass works, some of which have become quite adventurous in their use of dissonance and jagged rhythms. The familiar Glassian fondness for arpeggiated minor triads is much in evidence, but rather than a stylistic tic, it seems more like the application of a specific musical language that is perfectly suited to the poems.

The beauty of Glass' and Cohen's creation was enhanced by the superb level of the singing and instrumental playing. Soprano Dominique Plaisant has an attractive, soulful delivery and, seemingly, a direct pipeline to the emotional core of the poetry. The striking mezzo Tara Hugo has a clear, strong, folk-singer quality that suits her material perfectly. Honey-toned tenor Will Erat sounded particularly good on "I Want to Love You Now," and bass-baritone Daniel Keeling provided electrifying resonance, especially in his lowest register. The four of them blended gloriously in the evening's hit tune, "You Came to Me This Morning," with its haunting hook lyric, "a thousand kisses deep."

Instrumental playing was at a strikingly high level, with virtuoso solos delivered by violinist Tim Fain, bassist Eleonore Oppenheim, oboist Kate St. John and the versatile woodwind doubler Andrew Sterman, who played clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, piccolo, and sax with equal artistry. Mick Rossi showed impressive mastery of drums as well as keyboards, sharing the demanding keyboard duties with longtime Glass music director Michael Riesman. Glass himself also participated, on a third keyboard part, and in one nice theatrical touch, he turned his chair upstage to watch in admiration as bassist Oppenheim, a few feet away, skillfully negotiated a demanding, high-flying solo. Oppenheim was astonishingly poised under the circumstances.

Intermezzo IV

Earlier in the day, soprano Tammy Hensrud demonstrated, in a superb recital of Kurt Weill songs, that her turn as Jenny in "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny" was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of her range as a performer. She began her well-chosen program with "Nana's Lied," an archetypal example of German cabaret. Perched on a stool, Hensrud moved fluidly between speaking and singing, maintaining a conversational delivery even through sustained melodic lines. Communicating the words was her priority, but her singing was unfailingly of the first order.

I especially liked the astonishment she displayed in "Surabaya Johnny," that she could still love the faithless, pipe-smoking cad in spite of all his abuse. And her last gasped, "Je ne t'aime pas," concluding the song bearing that title, cut like a knife.

Hensrud shared the program with the sonorous baritone Jonathan Michie, who also has the elusive, in-between style of Kurt Weill down perfectly. Michie, still a graduate student at Eastman, sang the rarely heard "Four Whitman Songs" with a vibrant, focused delivery and full dramatic involvement. Then he donned a likeably arrogant persona for "This is the Life," a full-fledged solo musical scene from "Love Life," and delivered the final line "I'm free!" with an absolutely helpless look on his face. So often in Weill songs, people say the opposite of what they mean.

In the final piece, a very likable duet from the forgotten Weill/Lerner musical "Firebrand of Florence," Hensrud and Michie both adapted glamorous old-style movie musical personas, and even danced a little waltz during the bridge. Pianist Michael Baitzer played with outstanding affinity throughout.

Schoenberg for people who don't like Schoenberg

Schoenberg's "Verklaerte Nacht" for string sextet is perched right at the fulcrum of music history, summing up late Romantic Straussian chromaticism, while simultaneously looking ahead to twentieth century atonality. Pressing functional harmony to its absolute outer limits, it's also a blazing drama (based on an affecting poem by Richard Dehmel) full of deeply felt, intense emotion. Hearing it is a bracing reminder that before he blazed forward into the thickets of atonality, Schoenberg had first assimilated everything that came before him.

The St. Lawrence Quartet, joined by violist Daniel Phillips and cellist Edward Arron, gave a blistering, edge-of-your-seat account that none present will soon forget. Before the performance, Stephen Brennan of the Gate Theatre (Bernard in "The Constant Wife") read the poem aloud, enhancing the proceedings considerably.

Piccolo Spoleto Young Artists

Wednesday's program on the Young Artists Series at the College of Charleston Department of Music featured students of pianist and Artist-in-Residence Enrique Graf. Ciro Foderé, a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon, where Graf also teaches, demonstrated with Rachmaninoff's "Paganini Variations" that he can easily hold his own with older and more experienced pianists. This was a masterful, electric performance, by turns fiery and lyrical, including an unusually poetic rendition of the famous and rhapsodic eighteenth variation. At the second piano, playing a reduction of the orchestra part, Sean Kennard was no mere accompanist, but a full participant who displayed ample virtuosity of his own.

We were also treated to a lively, polished, and impressively idiomatic performance of Manuel De Falla's "Four Spanish Pieces" by Charleston Academy of Music teacher (and Graf private student) Susan McAdoo. College of Charleston sophomore Virginia Haselden bravely tackled the first movement of Grieg's famous "Concerto in A minor," expertly accompanied by Graf. Adept and sensitive, Haselden convincingly shaped the piece to suit her own stage of development, especially when the usual breakneck tempos in certain sections might not have been feasible.