There’s a very serious talent at work in this music by Stacy Garrop. Silver Dagger is a folk-song setting for piano trio, along similar lines to Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, and it’s extremely beautiful and quite fetchingly composed for the three instruments. In Eleanor’s Words is a cycle of six songs drawn from the newspaper columns of Eleanor Roosevelt. The concept is a good one: Roosevelt’s prose often approaches poetry, and her unfailing intelligence makes for texts that are worth reading on their own, and for which Garrop has found a similarly conversational musical style that fits them perfectly. The music is attractive and approachable, but not facile. There’s a version for chamber orchestra that I would dearly love to hear, but it would be difficult to imagine a more affectingly sung performance than that by mezzo Buffy Baggott–and Kuang-Hao Huang accompanies beautifully.
Gaia is an ambitious string quartet in five movements lasting about 34 minutes, and only here do I feel it necessary to express a few reservations. So much contemporary music seems adrift without some sort of programmatic underpinning, and this piece is no exception. Don’t get me wrong: the individual movements are effectively structured and often quite attractive. Dance of Mother Earth (silly name) is fun, and the Lamentation lives up to its title. However, the finale–…et in terra pax–really is a bit conventional, and it’s also the longest movement. Somehow the various sections don’t quite add up to a convincing whole, despite some excellent playing by the Biava Quartet. Still, other listeners may be more willing than I was to succumb to the music’s programmatic charms. I loathed Garrop’s Second Quartet “Demons and Angels”, and this one strikes me as far more appealing and successful. The sonics are just great, and irrespective of any quibbles, this disc makes an excellent case for exploring more of Garrop’s music. [2/17/2011]
