Composer collaborations with hand-picked performers of their work sets up all kinds of expectations, including the one that the performances will accurately reflect the composer’s intentions. When the performer is a singer, we figure not only the interpretations will wash, but the voice itself will closely project what the composer ideally imagines. Well, I think Ned Rorem is a very fine song composer, but soprano Carole Farley does absolutely nothing, either vocally or interpretively, to draw me to these pieces. Do the words–chosen from the classic lines of poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, and Spenser–really need the overt, mannered “extra help” she tries to give them? Does Rorem’s music? Too often Farley’s idea of expression amounts to just leaning harder on a pitch, darkening or covering it, or giving a cute little jazzy, pitch-altering scoop or slide. These are gimmicks, not artful, refined communicative gestures that show a consummate song-singer’s mastery of voice and word.
The uneasy feel to the opening song, “The Waking” (the first of a set of nine to texts by Theodore Roethke), comes from Farley’s annoying habit of beginning a syllable just before the beat and ever-so-slightly sliding onto the beat–you just want her to catch up, for heaven’s sake, but she never does! Then there’s the voice itself–her well-focused, assertive, bright tone is consistently colored by a penetrating, piercing quality that intensifies at louder dynamic levels and higher pitches. This creates a hard-edged sameness to the sound in every song, including the quieter, softer ones such as “Little Elegy”. Rorem accompanies at the piano, and as you pay more and more attention to what he’s doing you really appreciate the care and sensitivity the composer gives to the piano’s own “voice”, both in what he wrote and in how he plays it. The sound in general is on the hard-edged side, which does little to complement Farley’s voice, or to help warm a listener to a full hour’s recital. So, perhaps my expectations were too high; but a disc of Rorem songs is bound to get my–and many other listeners’–attention. My only explanation for this below-par performance: Farley had an off-day, or Dawn Upshaw was already booked.
