Stölzel: The Gorgeous Nothings

Album review

This recording of music by German-born American composer Ingrid Stölzel, who is on the composition faculty of the University of Kansas, showed up on Apple's classical music A-list, certainly a pleasure for the composer and for the small Navona label that issued the music. It does indeed have broad appeal. Stölzel cultivates an intensely lyrical language that depends not on harmony (her extended tonality is of a rather conventional sort) but on other factors: pedal points, melodic lines, textural configurations of various kinds. She has been frank about her difficulty, as a non-anglophone, in appreciating American poetry, but her studies have paid off: the songs here are extremely sensitively set. Stölzel's style fits gloriously with the poetry of Walt Whitman (sample anywhere in Soul Journey-Three Whitman Songs), as she devises concise and original ways of depicting Whitman's almost ecstatic tone. Almost as good is the set of Emily Dickinson writings that gives the album its name, not quite poems but envelope marginalia that were collected and published, and that again play to the directness of Stölzel's music. The songs are effectively set off against chamber music of larger scale but with similar ideas. Soprano Sarah Tannehill Anderson and mezzo soprano Phyllis Pancella grasp the need for text intelligibility here and deliver light treatments that respect the depths of the poetry. Navona deserves kudos for its engineering at campus halls at the universities of Kansas and Missouri; such venues are usually the acoustic kiss of death for recordings made in academic settings, but on this release there was an understanding of the intimate qualities of Stölzel's music. Kudos, too, to Apple's editors for identifying this standout academic release.

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