SOUNDS OF AMERICA R A T R A Y L U K E : P H O T O G R A P H Y issue of his culture – arguably the key issue in the world at large. The music, too, has much to admire. For a piece that opens like so much raw Stravinsky and undigested Britten, Mohammed Fairouz bends his sources to such personal ends and dramatic means that you eventually forget you started out humming along to The Rite of Spring. As a piece of stagecraft, though, Sumeida’s Song suffers the problems of many first operas. Granted, Verdi and Puccini were hardly geniuses out of the starting gate, but at least they had a grasp of their source material. Fairouz’s model – at least in terms of writing his own libretto – is Wagner, and Sumeida’s Song, adapted from a play by the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, bogs down in a thicket of details. Even Fairouz’s liner-note summary barely gets around to the point. Hakim’s tale of a village widow looking to avenge her dead husband and her educated son who eschews tribal violence in favour of modern ways has the potential of any Italian verismo. So too does it offer multicultural possibilities that Fairouz wields well in the score. But the actual story-telling is marred by a cumbersome back story and tentative narrative development. Fairouz knows his way around an orchestra and handles voices lyrically and expressively, so he surely has an opera in him somewhere. In the future, though, he might want to enlist a librettist. Ken Smith RI Gordon ‘Silver Rain’ Genius Child. Heaven. In Time of Silver Rain. Harlem Night Song. Dream Variations. Stars. Love Song for Antonia. Port Town. Daybreak in Alabama. Dreams/ Feet o’ Jesus. Song for a Dark Girl. Litany Nicole Cabell sop Ricky Ian Gordon pf Blue Gri in F BGR253 (64’ • DDD) Former Cardi f winner sings songs by the stage composer Every phrase in a song by Ricky Ian Gordon is wedded so seamlessly to the text that the result sounds natural and inevitable. These qualities pervade ‘Silver Rain’, the new disc of Gordon’s songs set to poems by Langston Hughes and performed by soprano Nicole Cabell with the composer as pianist. There are moments when Gordon’s lyricism revels in the kind of rapture and warmth found in works of Samuel Barber. But Gordon also claims a compositional voice very much his own – one that is quick to convey feeling and mood through soaring and playful melodic lines, harmonies of subtle hues, and lilting or surprising rhythmic shifts. In short, the songs Engaging: Eighth Blackbird record a patchwork of narrative works by living composers on ‘Silver Rain’ – its name taken from Hughes’s ‘In Time of Silver Rain’ – are gems of concision and emotional directness. The melting tenderness of ‘Dreams’ leads almost imperceptibly to the spiritual-inspired ‘Feet o’ Jesus’. Gordon keenly mirrors the essential optimism in Hughes’s verses in the ecstatic ‘Heaven’ and ‘Joy’. Even when the texts depict troubled states of mind, the music abounds in compassion (‘Troubled Woman’) and sly spirit (‘Strange Hurt’). Cabell sings each piece in a voice of arresting opulence and intensity. She can scale back her soprano to a hush, as in ‘Prayer’, or send it into flight when Gordon and Hughes are inclined towards ecstasy. Gordon proves to be an ideal collaborator, treating the piano parts with utmost clarity of line and harmonic and rhythmic inflection. Donald Rosenberg ‘Meanwhile’ Adès Catch Etezady Damaged Goods – About Time; Eleventh Hour Glass Music in Similar Motion Hartke Meanwhile Hurel …à mesure Mazzoli Still Life With Avalanche Eighth Blackbird Cedille F CDR90000 133 (68’ • DDD) EB explore kaleidoscopic diversity of new US music Two-time Grammy winners Eighth Blackbird are at it again for Cedille. An ingenious programme of 68 minutes is sequenced as if it were a concert itself, although in fact the recordings were made over the course of five sessions in 2010 and 2011. In each piece the performers seem to be exploring first what their instruments are going to have to do before setting out to play what their roster of composers has marked down on their scores, including three world-premiere recordings and only the second recording of Thomas Adès’s diverting Catch. Of the world premieres, Stephen Hartke’s miraculous Meanwhile, the CD’s title-track, is an absolute prize consisting of five jaunty, Asian-infused movements, clanging and tootling with pleasure, which you would give anything to hum. Missy Mazzoli’s Still Life With Avalanche and two movements from Roshanne Etezady’s Damaged Goods, the latter written as part of a collaborative project with the Minimum Security Composers Collective, encounter more sober topics and produce more mysterious moods and occasional violence. As the well-written notes reveal, there is an engaging story behind the way each piece came into being, along with such useful bits of trivia as the fact that Etezady was set on her path to becoming a composer at the age of 13 by seeing Philip Glass and his ensemble perform on Saturday Night Live – although probably not Music in Similar Motion, which Blackbird perform here with a kind of rustic industry which suggests the Glass engine exposed to the air. Laurence Vittes gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE JANUARY 2013 V