Leo Smit was a remarkable musician; deeply knowledgeable and endowed with a prodigious ability at the piano. A master class with Smit represented a combination of learning things you never thought you'd know about music with the sheer joy of basking in his great musicianship. Smit was connected at the highest levels of the American musical scene; he was a close friend to
Stravinsky,
Copland,
Bernstein,
Stokowski,
Lukas Foss, and countless others. Yet he never enjoyed a glittering concert career as a pianist. Smit received most of the top honors composers are eligible for in the United States at one time or another, but as a composer he felt sidelined by the wide adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s and its resultant marginalization of the tonally based, neo-classic idiom in which he worked so naturally and well. Toward the end of his life, Smit got a second wind as a composer, and within the three short years between 1988 and 1991, he composed an astounding 76 settings from poems of
Emily Dickinson, resulting in the six cycles collected under the rubric "The Ecstatic Pilgrimage." Bridge's Leo Smit: Song Cycles, featuring soprano
Georgine Resick with accompanist
Warren Jones, is the label's second stop in Smit's Dickinsenian community; the first, 33 Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson, featured the first, second, and sixth cycles with
Rosalind Rees and the composer on piano. This volume introduces the fourth and third cycles, "Beyond Circumference" and "The Marigold Heart," and an additional cycle on poems by his friend Marcia Willieme that may have been Smit's final compositional effort.
Resick is careful to characterize each song individually, not the easiest thing to do in a program of 36 songs, with some as short as 31 seconds. Her singing is consistently warm and generous and her diction is outstanding.
Resick does not employ the Anglican approach to vowel sounds or consonants, but sings in slightly rounded-off, "American" English. In this respect,
Resick does not sound unlike
Jan de Gaetani, whom Smit had in mind when he started composing "The Ecstatic Pilgrimage," although he knew he would never hear these songs in her voice, as she had already passed away by that time. Therefore, in a sense,
Resick has achieved a kind of musical "channeling" that would have astounded even Smit.
Warren Jones' accompaniment is sensitive, responsive, flexible, and, best of all, "unashamed."
Many singers will tell you that the art song tradition is alive and well, though it isn't always apparent from what one sees as reflected on recordings. Smit's "The Ecstatic Pilgrimage" is a creation stemming from times most people living in 2007 can easily remember, though it sounds like a statement stemming from the most "classic" of American classical traditions. Those who value art song in English should at least experience it, and many will embrace Bridge's Leo Smit: Song Cycles with enthusiasm.