PHYLLIS CURTIN
Coopland: Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson
Rorem: Songs with Aaron Copland and Ned Rorem, pianos
New from VAI Audio Great American Singers Series
Catalog # VAIA 1194
Phyllis Curtin was neglected by the recording industry during the prime years of her singing career, 1950-’80. Until recently, there was only a Beethoven 9th with Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, a haunting performance of Sibelius’s Luonataar with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic plus a Brahms Requiem with Ormandy and contributions to small label discs devoted to living composers. However, over the past few years, both VAI Audio and Vanguard have published CDs of some of Miss Curtin’s broadcasts and staged appearances in opera and song, from Mozart to Carlisle Floyd, and at last we get to hear what we’ve been missing.
This is a first-rate musical intelligence, a performer of fierce integrity to the music and the written word and a voice like clear spring water. It is not a glamorous voice. The tonal richness and seamless beauty of Tebaldi and Milanov are not to be heard. What’s left is a beautiful sound put to the service of the words. You can take dictation from Phyllis Curtin’s diction, and in every performance I have heard she lets you in on what is happening in the aria, scene or poem even if you are hearing the work for the first time. You don’t need to do homework to enjoy a Phyllis Curtin performance.
In the booklet accompanying this new VAI audio release devoted to some of his songs and to Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, composer Ned Rorem writes:
“I was ripe for her unusual (even more unusual today) admixture of nectarine sound with sharp-as-ice diction. To say that Phyllis is the most intelligent soprano I’ve ever known is not to denigrate her…throughout her career, her delicious voice has never been used for its own sake rather than as a medium to impart the sense and feel of a text…”
The entire disc is a joyful tribute to American art song. The last bars of Copland/Dickinson’s “Heart We Will Forget Him,” with the exquisite diminuendo on “Haste! Lest while you’re lagging/I may remember him!” is worth the price of the disc. Here is an artist unafraid to express fully where the music and the texts take her. Curtin is never coy, never cute and never performing. Curtin just is: entirely natural, scrupulous in following the notes and the texts. It takes a special degree of courage and insight to perform without any artifice, and this Curtin achieves.
Phyllis Curtin has long been identified with the songs of Ned Rorem. This CD includes 14 of them, with the composer at the piano, recorded in performance in Boston in 1969. I suspect that Ned Rorem is attracted to poetry first and to the uses of poetry rather than his own need for self-expression. His taste in poets in impressive: Paul Goodman, Elinor Wylie, Theodore Roethke, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Bishop are among those represented here. He and Curtin capture perfectly the loneliness in Frank O’Hara’s “For Poulenc,” the wit of Stein’s “I am Rose,” the horror—and the sauciness—of Bishop’s “A Visit to Saint Elizabeth.” The latter could easily double as a political statement.
Copland’s Dickinson songs can fall victim to the cutesies in student recitals. They require a mature performer who sees beyond the blueprint of Dickinson’s texts. For all of her lyrical grace is she putting one over on us? The songs performed directly and honestly always make an impact. When sung as Curtin does them here, with that extra degree of understanding, they induce shivers.
Miss Curtin writes, “I had not been an admirer of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Indeed, I found her annoying more often than not. But Mr. Copland understood her well. Through singing these songs I came to love her. I believe that Aaron Copland truly sent her Letter to the World and it is urgently alive in this form.” As urgently alive as the American art song is, thanks to the efforts of Copland, Rorem, and Phyllis Curtin.
