This disc is a slightly odd compilation of three song-cycles by
Dominick Argento (one of America's best vocal composers) and fifteen minutes of vocal music by
Ralph Vaughan Williams. It is an eighty-minute disc with very natural recital-hall type sound produced by Çedille's honcho James Ginsberg and the top engineering team of Mitchell G. Heller and Lawrence Rock.
Each of the five sets of songs on it is for a different sort of accompaniment. The constant factor is the soprano, the talented recitalist Patrice Michaels Bedi (sometimes billed more simply as Patrice Michaels).
Argento's Letters from Composers uses guitar as accompaniment, sensitively and dramatically played by Jeffrey Kust. The cycle has a striking range of moods ranging from terrified (
Chopin's despairing letter from the cold Mallorcan monastery), to enraged (
Mozart's letter about being by fired by the Archbishop of Salzburg), to loving (a
Robert Schumann letter to Clara), and Kust is a major factor in allowing Michaels Bedi to portray them fully.
Songs About Spring (settings of
E. E. Cummings poems) use a piano accompaniment (Elizabeth Buccheri) and are done with appropriate wistfulness. To Be Sung Upon the Water (Barcaroles and Nocturnes) require piano and clarinet accompaniment (adding
Larry Combs to the performers' list) and are most ably and touchingly presented. Combs remains for Vaughan Williams' brief Three Vocalises, and violinist
Elliott Golub is the accompaniment for four songs from Vaughan Williams' cycle Along the Field.
Patrice Michaels Bedi has an attractive voice and is a very sensitive musician and singer. She possesses (or allows herself) a "recital quality" of voice here, rather than showing a more operatic bloom, a slight detraction in this writer's opinion, but the disc is fully recommendable and certainly the best way to get to know a substantial representation of Argento's vocal work.