David Biedenbender: All We Are Given We Cannot Hold
Blue Griffin Recording

Composer David Biedenbender might want to consider signing Lindsay Kesselman to some kind of long-term contract when the Grammy-nominated soprano delivers a performance in Shell and Wing (2018) so spectacular it would be hard to imagine another singer equaling it—how telling that the work was written for Kesselman (plus the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble) by Biedenbender and his collaborator, poet Robert Fanning. The recording's other vocal setting, all we are given we cannot hold (2022), was also written by the pair for Kesselman, though specifically for the trio, HAVEN, featuring her, clarinetist Kimberly Cole, and pianist Midori Koga. Of course the soprano likewise benefits from her association with the composer and lyricist in being gifted such magnificent material to sing. Complementing the sumptuous vocal works on the seventy-eight-minute release are two chamber instrumentals, Solstice (2018) and Red Vesper (2013), performed by the Garth Newel Piano Quartet. While the works are diverse in their subject matter, they're unified in meditating on the ephemeral and fragile aspects of life.

In Shell and Wing, Kesselman sings with a searing intensity that calls to mind Dawn Upshaw's riveting performance of Górecki's third symphony on the 1992 Nonesuch release; another work of comparable impact and incandescent character is Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you as sung by Barbara Hannigan on the 2016 Winter & Winter release. Notes included with Biedenbender's release indicate that he and Fanning first intended for the work to centre on childhood but then adjusted their focus after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida turned the work into one dealing with the challenges of raising children in a violent world. Not unrelated, the titular work concentrates on the everyday moments of parenthood, ones tiny and small yet precious for being so fleeting. Nature connections inform the instrumental pieces, with Biedenbender drawing for inspiration for Solstice from visits to the Garth Newel Music Center in the Allegheny Mountains and Red Vesper, written after his sister-in-law's death from cancer, relating to a park's red rock formations.

The two stanzas that appear in the two-part Shell and Wing derive their tension from the conflict all parents experience between wanting to protect their children and recognizing the need to let them go. The opening movement, “Shell,” which the composer dubs “a sort of fragmented lullaby,” sees Kesselman swooping and soaring (“So, song in me, rise”), the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble supporting her every step of the way. Biedenbender's poignant music—frenetic at one moment and tender the next—parallels the emotional trajectory of Fanning's words. “Wing” emerges from a pianistic hush to become a gentle duet for soprano and shimmering vibraphone. The vocal control exercised by Kesselman is again spellbinding, especially when the music calls for her to move from a state of stillness to shattering declamation.

Rather than dilute the impact of one vocal setting with another, Biedenbender wisely has Red Vesper follow Shell and Wing, the instrumental pensive in its rendering by the Garth Newel Piano Quartet and clarinetist Mingzhe Wang. In this solemn, gradually intensifying meditation, pianist Jeannette Fang is the grounding centre around which Wang and the group's strings hypnotically spiral. A plaintive tone is reinstated with the advent of the poetic seven-part title work, though this time the instrumental design is sparer than in Shell and Wing when Kesselman's accompanied by Cole's clarinet and Koga's piano only. A boy tracing his name in breath on a car window and other travel-related actions assume a tragic dimension in “One and a Half Miles Away from Dying” when we learn that the car and its passengers are about to be obliterated by an out-of-control oil tanker. Parental ache permeates the elegiac “Watching My Daughter Through the One Way Mirror of a Preschool Observation Room” as a mother hopes that when she's dead “there'll be a thin pane such as this between us.” The love a parent feels for a child speaks through these pieces vividly, never more so than during “Model Nation” in its words, “Please—know me not as a country fading from view, but as one who carried with love the great world you now carry in you.” Again the composer fashions music to amplify the emotional character of the poet's texts, the combination potent whether the music's a whisper or a scream.

October 2023