It might have delighted Emily Dickinson to discover that her personalized poetry, crafted in the middle of Massachusetts in the mid-19th century, has summoned a quartet of 20th and 21st-century gentlemen callers, each presenting himself as a competent, compositional suitor.
On a new Pentatone recording, A Certain Slant of Light, Aaron Copland, Gordon Getty, Jake Heggie, and Michael Tilson Thomas are welcomed by the clear, ingenuous vocalizations of soprano Lisa Delan, squired by conductor Lawrence Foster and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille. George Boziwick, former chief of the music division at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, provides valuable liner-note insights into the composers and their poetic muse.
The results here are diverse but satisfyingly uniform in delight and charm, appropriate to the source of the texts. Copland’s Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, the orchestral set which opens this album, bears an unaffected brightness, rather in the spirit of the European Romantic composers of the poet’s time. Foster paces his company artfully in following Delan, from the radiance of “Nature, the gentlest mother” through the forthrightness of “There came a wind like a bugle,” the wise reflection of “The world feels dusty,” and the hilarity of “Going to Heaven!”
Delan’s engaging theatricality and the evergreen freshness of Dickinson’s observations are further evinced in Heggie’s setting of “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” This composer’s lovely way with long vocal lines is showcased in “Silence,” and he gently rocks “That I did always love,” the sweet and soft qualities of Delan’s instrument allowing words and melody to breathe affectingly.
Getty’s set seems aptly to dress the elegance of Dickinson’s expression in more formal Victorian garb, audible in the arching harmonies of “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” and the bell-borne portent of “There’s a Certain Slant of Light.” Delan’s familiarity with this composer’s operatic work is in evidence here, although his setting of “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” derived from the same text as Copland’s “The Chariot,” heard earlier on the disc, takes a more whimsical, Mahlerian approach to the fatal coach ride.
Tilson Thomas makes arguably best use of the teamed colors of the orchestra, including the percussion propelling “Down Time’s Quaint Stream.” Horns and strings sing alongside Delan’s vibrant reading of “The Bible.” For “The Earth Has Many Keys,” above Tilson Thomas’s lurking postmodern theme, Delan emits a vivifying radiance. As with Dickinson herself, Delan winningly transcends the medium she’s recorded on.
