Chelsea Hart Melcher: So Smooth, So Sweet: Songs of Allen Sapp
Navona Records

Allen Sapp: Live Piano Works
Navona Records

It's probably safe to say that American composer Allen Sapp (1922-99) is better known to music historians than the general listening public, even though he's credited with having produced more than 140 compositions, more than forty of them for solo piano. In issuing not one but two Sapp releases, Navona Records is casting a bright new light on his work and further to that showcasing two distinct sides in releasing a vocal recital album and a comprehensive solo piano collection. The case for his music is made all the stronger when the singer is soprano Chelsea Hart Melcher who, partnering with her pianist husband Paul Melcher, delivers premiere recordings of the Harvard composer's songs. That she would dedicate her debut album entirely to Sapp's material also says much about how fervently she believes in the value of his work.

His was a particularly interesting case. At Harvard University, he studied with Walter Piston and later did the same privately with Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger. After serving in WWII, Sapp did graduate work at Harvard and then was on its music faculty from 1950 to 1958. But in the subsequent two decades, his focus shifted to administrative positions at three other universities, and it was only in 1980 that he returned to teaching and composing; in the last twenty years of his life, he added more than sixty new works to his output. That split in production is reflected in the four works featured on So Smooth, So Sweet, with two dating from 1952 and the others 1983 and 1988.

In 1952, the young Harvard University composer initiated work on three song cycles, The Lady and the Lute, Nursery Rhymes, and Seven Epigrams (Both Sweet and Sour), the first two of which appear on So Smooth, So Sweet. For the first, he selected eight poems from Robert Herrick's Hesperidies (1648) and structured the work's design so that the first and last songs, both tender and in 3/4 time, would anchor it. In contrast to the oft-lyrical tone of The Lady and the Lute is the beguilingly child-like Nursery Rhymes, its four songs all short and stemming from the time of his first son's birth. Leaping ahead three decades, Affliction (1983) found Sapp creating an eleven-song cycle as an analogue to the poem “Affliction (I)” from George Herbert's The Temple (1633). Five years later, Sapp composed Two Songs, which was written for and premiered by Sharon Radionoff. When he asked her for text ideas, she suggested poems her mom had read to her when she was little, the anonymous “Mister Nobody” (“Anonymous Eponymous”) and “Raggedy Man” (“Riley Set Wryly”) by James Whitcomb Riley; Radionoff further asked that he write them in a musical theatre style, so Sapp presented the first as “a kind of recitative and aria [with] pseudo-Handelian resonances” and the other "as a no-nonsense, tough sort of jazzy piece to be rendered freely, with rhythms strong, lots of syncopations, and plenty of bitter-sweet harmonies.”

Sapp couldn't have asked for better interpreters than the Melchers. A graduate of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Ohio State University, and Central Michigan University, Chelsea humanizes the composer's material with her rich, resonant voice, and her attention to phrasing and sensitivity to the shifting emotional currents of the songs are unfailing and impressive. Having performed as a soloist in works by Verdi, Beethoven, Mahler, Mozart, and others, she brings ample experience to the project. Paul, a composer as well as pianist, is an alumnus of St. Olaf College and Central Michigan University and has served as music director for various opera companies and accompanied professional singers and choirs. The two execute Sapp's often difficult material with authority and bolster its accessibility through their efforts.

Recorded between November 2023 and October 2024 at Graves Piano Recital Hall in Columbus, the album opens with The Lady and the Lute, the album's title track leading the way and its words “So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice” as applicable to the soprano articulating them as to the titular lady. Lively songs follow, some praising (“Clear Are Her Eyes”), others playful (“Her Pretty Feet”). Whereas the penultimate song is bitingly vindictive (“Goe, Perjur'd Man”), the comforting tone of the opener reasserts itself for the concluding “When I Thy Singing Next Shall Heare.” The mood naturally lightens with Nursery Rhymes and its jovial “Ride a Cock-horse,” endearing “Old Mother Hubbard,” tender “Little Jack Horner,” and spirited “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Two Songs changes the musical landscape again with the theatrical, recitative-aria hybrid “Anonymous Eponymous” and the cheeky cabaret-styled swing of “Riley Set Wryly” (“O the Raggedy Man he works fer Pa; An' he's the goodest man ever you saw”), both of which the Melchers deliver with gusto. An overall lyrical style reinstates itself for Affliction, though, as expected, contrasts emerge between the parts. To that end, it's not surprising to see dramatic tonal shifts occur from one song to the next, such that one exuding romance and affection (“When First Thou Didst Entice to Thee My Heart”) is followed by others comparatively light-hearted (“I Looked on Thy Furniture So Fine”) and riddled with sadness and sorrow (“At First Thou Gav'st Me Milk and Sweetnesses,” “My Flesh Began unto My Soul in Pain”). While all of the performances are strong, the Melchers' rendering of the pensive “Yet, for I Threaten'd Oft the Siege to Raise” and hymnal “Yet, Though Thou Troublest Me” speak particularly powerfully on behalf of their artistry as interpreters.

Like So Smooth, So Sweet, the two-volume collection of solo piano works features a married couple, though in this case it's the composer and his wife, pianist Norma Bertolami Sapp (1921-95). All but one of the performances, culled from material in the Ohio State University Music & Dance Library's Allen Sapp Collection, were recorded live at the Patricia Corbett Theatre, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Nine works appear, of which eight are performances by Norma from the ‘80s and ‘90s and the ninth a historic 1961 recording of Sapp himself at Butler Auditorium, Capen Hall, University of Buffalo.

Norma was clearly qualified to present Allen's works. She studied at Radcliffe College and Harvard University and was principal assistant to Leonard Bernstein at Brandeis University in the early ‘50s. She performed with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Budapest String Quartet, and after meeting Allen when they were students at Harvard and marrying him in 1943 went on to premiere many of his compositions for solo piano and chamber and orchestral works featuring piano. The production team deserves a word of praise for the excellent sound quality of the release; one would never guess from the recordings that the performances happened so many decades ago. Stylistically, Sapp's piano writing resists easy capture, its idiosyncratic character intimated by Howard Pollack in his book Harvard Composers in noting that it combines “aspects of Debussy's lushness, Bartok's percussiveness, and Schoenberg's jaggedness.” Complementary to that is the description offered by Alan Green in liner notes clarifying that “(n)early all his compositions following the Suite for Piano were created using serial methods, but usually within a discernible tonal context.”

Written in 1949 and dedicated to Copland, the five-movement suite that opens the collection quickly establishes the audacity of Sapp's writing with five compact parts that merge neoclassicism and serialism (its adagio-styled second movement, in fact, represents his first attempt at composing using serial techniques). The suite's followed by six sonatas—II, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII, with III repeated in Sapp's own performance—along with Fantasy III: Homage to Mendelssohn, composed in the summer of 1992. Reflecting that previously mentioned gap in his creative output, sonatas II, III, and IV were created in the ‘50s (they're known as his Roman Sonatas, as they were created in 1957 while he was on a Harvard sabbatical and in Rome), while V and VI were composed in 1980 and VIII 1985-86. Each sonata differs in some fundamental way from the others. Whereas he fashioned the second after a baroque suite, for the third he drew for inspiration from a number of Beethoven piano sonatas. Unlike the four- and three-movement designs of the II, III, IV, and VIII sonatas, Sapp's fifth features a single one only, while the sixth has two (he strikingly characterized each movement as being “a kind of Möbius strip of the other”). The eighth is the longest, approximately double the size of the other sonatas, and its first movement alone exceeds in duration the fifth in its entirety.

As each probing work appears, the characterizations by Pollack and Green of Sapp's music are supported by chromatic material that alternates between evocative nachtmusik episodes and jagged percussive passages. His bold blend of tonality and serialism makes for consistently startling results, music that's at once both accessible and challenging to the ear. Even when a traditional design is adopted, Sapp still finds ways to surprise. The third sonata, for example, adheres to the conventional fast-slow-fast format, but the concluding “Agitato” gets underway with a jazzy boogie-woogie bass line. Written for Norma to perform, the fourth likewise hews to a fast-slow-fast design, though its energized opening allegro and brooding central movement are completed by a robust set of theme and variations.

Carrying the sole marking “Violently,” the single-movement fifth was tentatively sketched in 1968 and, after Sapp returned to composing, completed in 1980. A dramatic, immersive travelogue of varying moods, the material segues between sharply defined moments of turbulence and tranquility, with recitatives, ariosos, and arias emerging during the journey. The epic opening movement of the expansive eighth advances through sixteen separate episodes and was conceived in cinematic terms, with Sapp likening its techniques to ones used by filmmakers—zoom-ins, cross-cuts, establishing shots, and so on. When Norma first struggled with figuring out how the sections connected, he told her “to think of herself as a camera, and the camera is moving from scene to scene.” As arresting, if less adventurous, is the sparkling middle movement, marked “Iridescently,” while the agitated final movement, “Vehemently,” juxtaposes aggressive block chords and rapidly flowing bass patterns to dizzying effect.

August 2025