Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Simple Songs (soprano and ensemble)	Aaron Jay Kernis	Listen
Songs of Innocents, Book I	Aaron Jay Kernis	Listen
Songs of Innocents, Book II	Aaron Jay Kernis
Valentines	Aaron Jay Kernis

Reviews

• There's no doubt that Philadelphia-born Aaron Jay Kernis (b.1960) has a good sense of humour. His Superstar etude #1 for piano is dedicated to Jerry Lee Lewis and requires the performer not only to pound and glissando away in best 'Killer' fashion but also to let out ecstatic shouts of 'Ohhh, baby!' at its climax. Kernis has a more serious side, however. For example, Colored Field, an English horn concerto, was his response to visits to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
  I interviewed Kernis many years ago and I enjoyed his irreverent streak It comes as no surprise to me, then, that he seems to find inspiration in naughty children. , two books of five songs each, were composed between 1988 and 1990. Tne first book spotlights laregly exemplary children, starting with Krishna and ending with the poor but submissive victim of 'Table Rules for Little Folks', with its child-unfriendly list of restrictions and injunctions. ('I must not speak a useless word' should apply tobig folks too!) Kernis deliciously sets the last to a tune that is a perfect pastiche of the Victorian era. His setting of the word 'bumpity' in 'Bunches of Grapes' ('a bumpity ride in a wagon of hay for me') is endearing and affectionate. Kernis's vocal writing has many facilities like these.
  In the second book, though, we immediately meet the untra-wicked John, Tom and James, who get their just deserts: 'They've all grown up ugly, and nobody cares.' The pianist lends his voice to the telling of this lamentable tale, and he and the soprano eventually dissolve in exaggerated wails. We also meet Keats's naughty boy who ran away to Scotland (enough said?!) and a child wgho gets carried away with painting things blue. Order is restored in 'Lullaby' and the book ends with 'Tumbling' ('in jumping and tumbling / we spend the whole day') and Kernis's setting imaginatively tumles along!
  A mroe serious side of Kernis is represented by his colelction of five Simple Songs for soprano and chamber ensemble, composed in 1991 to texts by Hildegard von Bingen, Ryokan and Rumi, and excerpts from Psalms 1 and 131, all taken from The Enlightened Heart, Stephen Mitchell's anthology of spiritual poems. With texts as good as these, a sensitive compsoer like Kernis can hardly go wrong. His heart is on his sleeve here, not least in the last song, whose extensive instrumental introduction is an obvious homage to Mahler.
  Valentines, written in 1999-2000 for Renee Fleming, is anything but simple. Carol Ann Duffy's poems explore absence and loss, as well as the feasability of an onion as a symbol of love and, humorously, the troubles of a woman who finds that her husband's touch now turns everything to gold. Kernis's language is tougher here, so there's no danger of sentimentality, but these settings lack the intuitive immediacyof their disc mates. Soprano Susan Narucki specialises in contemporary music; her discography (Crumb, Vivier, Andriessen et al) is like a listing for 'Who's worth hearing among modern composers?' ...
  Raymond S Tuttle, International Record Review, 01 May 2008