FOSS: The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Julianne Baird, Frederick Urrey, Peter Castildi, Kevin Deas et al.; Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Richard Auldon Clark conducting. Newport Classic NPD-85609 (CD).
Despite the avant-garde thrust of the later part of his career, it seems to be his early populist vein that has most attracted record companies to Lukas Foss in recent years. Witness the various revivals of his "Three American Pieces" and now what is billed as the first complete recording of his 1950 folk opera "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," based on the short story by Mark Twain.I don't know that anyone would claim the Twain story is his greatest, and happily neither the composer nor the performers try to inflate its simple charms.
From his brightly energetic yet intimate handling of the Overture, with its "Appalachian Spring"-like flavor, to the clever instrumental approximations of the frog's movements, conductor Richard Auldon Clark literally keeps things hopping, his singers likewise leaping into their roles with polish and enthusiasm.
That is especially true of the always-admirable Julianne Baird as Lulu, whose extra song, added later for Venice, is included. (If you don't want it, you can always program it out.) But bass-baritone Kevin Deas registers no less tellingly as the Stranger, whose entrance recalls that of the Devil in that other "Daniel Webster" opera (which happens to be the name of Twain's frog), even to the use of the violin.
Elsewhere Foss offers his own unique harmonization of "Sweet Betsy From Pike," and the CD opens with Peter Castildi's over-reverberant, and perhaps overly rustic, reading of excerpts from the original story. Happily the music that follows is sonically more in the picture.
TO THE SOUL: THOMAS HAMPSON SINGS THE POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN. Songs of Bernstein, Bridge, Burleigh, Hindemith, Ives, Rorem, Stanford, Tilson Thomas, Vaughan Williams, Weill, etc. Thomas Hampson, baritone; Craig Ruttenberg, piano. EMI 7243-5-55028-2-7 (CD).
Here is another release that juxtaposes spoken material with music based on it, in this case the poetry of Walt Whitman.
That means a lot of music to choose from, as the notes that accompany the CD cite over 1,200 settings of Whitman's verses. Indeed baritone Thomas Hampson, who does both the singing and the speaking, claims to have discovered more than 400 settings for voice and piano alone.
Here he offers 22 of them, including some commissioned specifically for this project. They range from C.V. Stanford's straight Victorian setting of the title song - and one can hear its effect on his pupil Ralph Vaughan Williams, who subsequently set the same verses in his "To the Unknown Region" - to Leonard Bernstein's "To What You Said," with its homoerotic overtones.
Nor is that the only place such yearnings surface in either the music or the poetry. Witness Ned Rorem's "As Adam Early in the Morning," with its lyric timelessness, or Michael Tilson Thomas' "We Two Boys Together Clinging," with its serpentine vocal line and restless keyboard accompaniment.
Between these come the stately tenderness of Frank Bridge's "The Last Invocation," the simple yet longspun melody of Vaughan Williams' "A Clear Midnight" and Kurt Weill's semi-wistful yet sharply poignant setting of the "Dirge for Two Veterans," fully in a class with Holst's and Vaughan Williams' otherwise very different treatments for chorus and orchestra.
At best I can manage only a half-hearted recommendation for some of Whitman's poetry, which must have seemed excessive even in his day (cf. Dickens' parodies of it in the American pages of "Martin Chuzzlewit"). But it is fascinating to hear the varied responses - some of them unforgettable - it elicited, and apparently is still eliciting, from such a wide range of composers.
Whatever that response, Hampson applies himself to it with an unforced sensitivity and nobility, without the slightest sense of strain. Nor is he let down by his accompanist, Craig Rutenberg, to whom one of the songs, Gerald Busby's "Behold This Swarthy Face," is in fact dedicated.