Molly Fillmore: Bold Beauty: Songs by Juliana Hall
Blue Griffin Records

On Bold Beauty, soprano Molly Fillmore and pianist Elvia Puccinelli present stellar interpretations of works by American composer Juliana Hall. Adding to the appeal of the recording is the intimate character of the texts: two pieces are based on letters by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Emily Dickinson, while another uses poems by Fillmore herself, each one inspired by a female American painter. For the remaining work, Hall set music to poems by Amy Lowell, Carl Sandberg, and Millay. The performers and composer bring formidable credentials to the project. Fillmore is Professor of Voice at the University of North Texas and Chair of the Division of Vocal Studies and has appeared at the Met in Satyagraha and Der Ring der Nibelungen as well as with multiple other opera companies and symphony orchestras. An accomplished organist, harpsichordist, and choral conductor, Puccinelli teaches at the University of Southern California. Hall has written some sixty song cycles, monodramas, and works of vocal chamber music and had works performed at Carnegie Hall, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Wigmore Hall. The list of credits for each Bold Beauty participant is impressive.

Like Lori Laitman and other masters of the art song craft, Hall is ultra-sensitive to the texts chosen for her works. While lyricism is abundant, she fashions her music in accordance with the words, such that their expressive power is reinforced and meaning amplified. In the release booklet, she crystallizes her approach as follows: she tries “to breathe a sense of clarity into a musically-based form so that the meaning behind the poet's words becomes completely transparent to the listener, so that the poet's ‘story' is told clearly and authentically.” Her emphasis on clarity and transparency is well-reflected in the recording's material. Twenty-seven songs are performed, with most in the one- to three-minute range and only one pushing past four. That makes for a programme that's both rapidly changing and constantly stimulating.

Consistent with art song tradition, two of the works, Theme In Yellow and Cameos, are set to poetry. Atmosphere, colour, and imagery are central to their essence, and Hall with great care strives to illuminate the texts with vivid and evocative music. Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush and Letters from Edna connect directly with the listener in featuring words of the most personal kind Dickinson and Millay wrote to others. The texts are revealing, of course, but are as fascinating for reflecting the naturally poetic sensibility that emerges in a form that's inherently informal. Here's a case where reviewing the texts of the letters proves rewarding, even as an activity separate from the musical treatment.

The eight-part Letters from Edna (1993) inaugurates the album with no small amount of charm and theatricality, the texts in this case ones sent to individuals with personal and professional connections to Millay, from her mother and sister to publishers and fellow poets. While any number of songs would effectively illustrate how Hall's writing mirrors the text, the opening song, “To Mr. Ficke and Mr. Bynner,” serves as a representative example. Note, for instance, the brightness in the opening appeal "Mr. Earle has acquainted me with your wild surmises,” the ingratiating tone of “Gentlemen,” the drama in the rendering of “I must convince you of your error; my reputation is at stake,” the coyness in the subsequent “Not that I have an aversion to brawny males; au contraire, au contraire,” and the lyricism with which the song ends (“Then let my message like an arrow dart / And pierce a way into the world's great heart”). Hear also the affection for her college roommate that resonates through “To Anne Gardner Lynch” (“Ours was a perfect friendship—I knew it at the time—and it is still just as true”) and the shift in tone from radiance to sadness in the line “Spring is here,—and I could be very happy, except that I am broke” sent to publisher Harriet Monroe. Understandably, the most heartfelt letter is the one sent to Cora B. Millay (“Do you know, almost all people love their mothers, but I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you”). To Ficke she writes that she loathes writing letters, though you'd never guess from their contents.

The seven songs of Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush (1989) capture Dickinson's spirit and like the Millay work convey the warmth she felt for the people in her life, including her lifelong mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Susan Gilbert, who would later become Emily's sister-in-law. The tone of Hall's writing for the Dickinson work is often exuberant (see, for example, the letter written to Emily Fowler, an early classmate), but a ponderous quality emerges too in keeping with the writer's introspective and sensitive nature. The tenderness of her words to Gilbert, “I wept a tear here, Susie, on purpose for you…,” is rendered movingly by Hall in the beauty of the musical treatment.

An evocative song cycle about autumn, Theme in Yellow (1990) follows, its six songs set to Lowell, Millay, and Sandburg. Hall's lyrical “Song” expresses the plaintive feeling Millay expresses in describing the transition from summer to fall (“Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely, Gone again on every side”); the tension with which “Ripe Corn” begins, on the other hand, reflects the turbulence of nature as described by Sandburg (“The wind blows. The corn leans. The corn leaves go rustling…”). The sparseness of the piano accompaniment in “November” well-matches the solemnity of Lowell's words (“And I sit under a lamp / Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart”). That the character of the songs extends from wistfulness to rapture reflects our own conflicting responses to the season when appreciation for its splendour is partnered with melancholy at summer's passing.

Cameos (2017-18) is also in six parts though here subject matter and authorship are different. As mentioned, Fillmore wrote the poems, each one honouring a particular woman artist and titled after them. With descriptive details about the artist's life and her work intermixed in the texts, Hall was given much with which to work and responded with music that, as it does elsewhere on the recording, reflects the character of the text. During “Agnes Pelton” and “Kay WalkingStick,” the music is languorous; the treatment is playful and dance-like, on the other hand, for “Nellie Mae Rowe” with its mention of “magic markers and crayons and pencils” and reference to “chewing gum sculpture.” Hall opts for lyricism for “Alice Dalton Brown,” and playfulness, again, in “Corita Kent” (“A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K ... Come sing again, Corita”). As an arguable barometer of its success, Cameos makes one to want to see examples of each artist's work in order to more fully appreciate what Hall and Fillmore have created.

November 2021