David Biedenbender - "All We Are Given We Cannot Hold" album review
David Biedenbender - All We Are Given We Cannot Hold album
It has taken these weighing emotions and transformed them into pure beauty in the form of art song.
With his first monographic album, David Biedenbender continues to prove himself as an chamber music composer while showcasing his delicate text setting ability. Distributed by Blue Griffin Recording, All We Are Given We Cannot Hold juxtaposes two works for voice and ensemble using text by poet Robert Fanning with two older instrumental pieces featuring the Garth Newel Piano Quartet. Overall, album takes the listener on an emotional journey, rapidly swinging between parental worries and pondering natural monolithic beauty.
Shell and Wing, a two-part work for soprano and ensemble, establishes a sense of unease from the first fluttering note. Setting newly-written text by Fanning, both the music and poetry contemplate parents' personal fears when sending their children out into the modern world of violence. Composed in 2018, Shell and Wing takes an interesting approach to the child-parent relationship, with Shell being a parental lullaby as deformed Schumann melodies haunt the air, while Wing is the child's response, a dream which grows stronger and uncannily similar to the parent's music as Biedenbender's progression continually repeats. The music is sparse and stays away from relying on harmony to drive the piece. Instead, Biedenbender's intricate scoring creates clear childhood associations in a manner which takes creative advantage of orchestrational clichés and uses them to his favor. Kevin Noe and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble expertly navigate the score, resulting in a beautiful and balanced tapestry of sound over which soprano Lindsay Kesselman is able to evoke both the love and concern which occurs between any parent-child relationship.
The two purely instrumental works on the album are both directly inspired by natural beauty. Red Vesper, here in a version for the Garth Newel Piano Quartet and clarinetist, Mingzhe Wang, is the oldest composition on the album, written in 2013 as a self-reflection which takes place around the red rock formations in national parks. Biedenbender takes an interesting, counterintuitive approach to the form of a meditative vespers. His peace is found in terms of a fluctuating pulse, as insistent repeated notes in the piano open the piece and are heard prominently throughout. Solstice is a large scale work divided into four movements, with each movement representing one of the four seasons. The music is taken from the composer's visits to Garth Newel Music Center in the Alleghany Mountains. The four movements combine together to balance each other out in terms of mood. The listener quite literally travels through the seasonal year, starting with the warmth of summer, the long ending of autumn, the cold sting of winter's memory, and culminating with a brief rain and Appalachian fiddle tune in spring.
The titular piece, all we are given we cannot hold, is a cycle of seven songs composed in 2022 for Haven Trio. Again featuring Kesselman as soprano, Biedenbender relies on incredibly prosodic text setting with specific rhythms, which are more often than not approximated to further play into the speech-like intended effect. Here Biedenbender shows off his strong compositional craft, fully utilizing the trio's timbral possibilities while keeping the work incredibly approachable and the text easy to comprehend. While at times borderline kitschy, the music is mostly traditionally tonal and pretty-sounding, although just enough variation is included to keep audiences engaged with Fanning's provocative text. For a cycle which reflects upon the fleeting beauty of the small moments between a parent and child, there is a lot of focus on death, especially that of the parent. The constant implication that soon the parent may die is both depressing and quite heavy, which makes it no small feat that Fanning and Biedenbender have taken these weighing emotions and transformed them into pure beauty in the form of art song.
listen to All We Are Given We Cannot Hold on major streaming services or purchase here
Comments
Post a Comment