PINKHAM 2 Housman Settings.1 The Green Wall.2 Called Home.3 When Love Was Gone.4 2 Encore Songs.5 Come, Look Quietly.6 3 Latin Motets.7 3 Canticles from Luke.8 Carols and Cries.9 4 Marian Antiphons.10 The Isle of Dreams.11 Letters from Saint Paul.12 The Wellesley Hills Psalm Book13

Fanfare, May/Jun 2009 by Clarke, Colin, Orgel, Paul

PINKHAM 2 Housman Settings.1 The Green Wall,2 Called Home.3 When Love Was Gone.4 2 Encore Songs.5 Come, Look Quietly.6 3 Latin Motets.7 3 Canticles from Luke.8 Carols and Cries.9 4 Marian Antiphons.10 The Isle of Dreams.11 Letters from Saint Paul.12 The Wellesley Hills Psalm Book13 * Joe Dan Harper (ten);1,2,4,5,8-10,12 Aaron Engebreth (bar);1,3,6,7,11,13 Alison d'Amato (pn);1,3,6 Anne Kissel Harper (pn);1,4,5 Jim Piorkowski (gtr);2 Heinrich Christensen (org)7-13 * FLORESTAN 1003 (2 CDs: 124:50)

This is a major issue. Recently, I reviewed, very positively, a disc of Pinkham's works, The Cask of Amontillado and The Garden Party Fanfare 30:5), while simultaneously bemoaning the paucity of performances of his works in the U.K., where I am based. The present release is, if anything, of even greater significance and merely serves to reinforce the plea for more.

The division of this two-disc box into songs for voice, piano, and guitar, and songs for voice and organ, is a neat one. How lucky Pinkham was to have such interpreters at his disposal for this project. Joe Dan Harper, the tenor who sings the first of the Housman settings ("Stars, I have seen them fall") sings with a magnificent purity of expression. There is nothing superfluous here, an approach that chimes entirely with Pinkham's deep simplicity of writing. Vocal lines are florid and almost conspiratorial-one gets the impression that these songs are directed straight at you, the listener. In that sense, the recorded medium is on this occasion the perfect vehicle for dissemination.

The Green Wall (2000) is scored for voice (Harper again) and guitar (Jim Piorkowski). The cycle works well sung by a tenor (it was originally intended for the soprano Barbara Marino). Ten years previously, Pinkham had set the same texts by James Wright for mixed chorus and small chamber orchestra. On reflection, he realized that the story-telling nature of the poetry fitted a solo voice best, with guitar accompaniment. The song, "A Fit against the Country," is perhaps the most memorable of this collection (although it is a close-run thing). The rocking, gentle guitar provides a lovely backdrop for the flowing vocal lines; mutually arrived-upon accents, when they occur, make their mark beautifully.

Called Home (1996-97) sets poems by the great Emily Dickinson, and is dedicated to the composer John Luther Adams. Aaron Engebreth is the baritone here, accompanied by pianist Anne Kissel Harper. Engebreth has a very attractive voice, very focused in its lower register (unlike many baritones, he does not sound uncomfortable in these lower reaches) and free in its higher ones. Pinkham's settings of Dickinson are masterly, ever responsive to the twists and turns of her thought patterns. The second song, "Promise this," is especially effective because of the bleak austerity of the setting, a bleakness amplified by the next song, "Let down the bars, O Death." The shifting, disturbed atmosphere of the final song in the set, "Tie the strings to my life," is remarkably well projected here. When love has gone is a 1993 setting of texts by James Wright originally written for the mezzo, D'Anna Fortunato, and performed here by Joe Dan Harper. There is a held-breath sense of sad recollection running through "A Breath of Life" that is amplified in the nocturnal musings of "Beginning." In this context, the bare octaves of "My Grandmother's Ghost" achieve the requisite spookiness astonishingly well.

The Two Encore Songs were written for encore after two specific song-cycles: the sprightly "Little Marble Wall" for The Green Wall and the more narrational "Love in a warm room in winter" for Come, Look Quietly (which here actually follows it). Come, Look Quietly itself was composed for Joe Dan Harper, who is not the performer here. The reason? At the time of composition, tenor Harper was a baritone, so here the cycle is performed by Aaron Engebreth. Pinkham's cycle contains moments of much charm but also moments of real weight (as in the final movement, "I want to sleep").

I have to confess that when I saw that the second volume comprised songs for voice and organ, I felt a certain amount of trepidation. No great lover of organ music at the best of times, the thought of organ-accompanied songs for 69 minutes pretty much filled me with dread. How wrong can a reviewer be?

Unsurprisingly, there is a distinct liturgical bent to this disc. The organist throughout is the excellent Heinrich Christensen. The recordings for this second disc took place in King's Chapel, Boston, in July 2008. Pinkham was intimately involved with the installation of the present instrument, a C. B. Fisk organ, in 1964. The Three Latin Motets of 1998, dedicated to Ned Rorem, includes some adventurous harmonic writing for organ and mellifluous vocal lines (try the opening "Jesu, dulcis memoria") despatched with smooth confidence by Engebreth. These motets were performed at Pinkham's memorial service in January 2007.

The "Ave Maria" of the Three Canticles from Luke was apparently composed overnight, but there is no indication of haste in this little jewel. The last two canticles are in fact the familiar Magnificat and Nunc dimittis. The Magnificat rises to a splendid climax around "Sicut erat in principio"; the Nunc is a contemplative setting, in which Joe Dan Harper succeeds in setting up something of a hypnotic rhythm.