Laura Choi Stuart & Tanya Blaich: Rituals: Art Songs by Ives, Hahn, and Bolcom
Acis

Photographs adorning Rituals of small-town America make it seem as if soprano Laura Choi Stuart and pianist Tanya Blaich have literally stepped into the world Charles Ives' music so powerfully evokes. And in fact that's precisely what they do on the sixty-five-minute release, though they enter just as vividly the elegant French epoch associated with Reynaldo Hahn and the intimate domesticity of Ives' fellow American, William Bolcom. The Eagle Pond Farm house in New Hampshire at which Choi Stuart and Blaich are shown isn't Ives' home, by the way, but instead the preserved one of poets Jane Kenyon and her husband, Donald Hall, as it's Kenyon's song cycle with Bolcom, Briefly It Enters, that dominates the concluding third of the release.

There's much to commend Rituals, from performances of heartfelt conviction to the obvious care the recitalists brought to the project. After eight Ives songs, seven from Hahn's Études latines appear followed by the nine miniatures of Briefly It Enters, with Bolcom's 1997 cycle framed by two from Cabaret Songs. Despite the composers' differences, their pieces combine into a fluid, full-album statement that covers matters great and small, from domestic and community rituals to issues of memory, love, and death. The duo's exceptionally satisfying art song collection is further distinguished by presenting the first commercial release of Briefly It Enters in twenty-five years.

Choi Stuart's a seasoned and in-demand lyric soprano whose repertoire includes Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and Brahms but also Kaija Saariaho and Vaughan Williams. She's as comfortable delivering an art song recital as she is an opera role with companies such as Washington National Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, and Lake George Opera. A specialist in art song repertoire, Blaich has been a faculty member of New England Conservatory of Music's collaborative piano and voice departments since 2006 and supports Choi Stuart, with whom she's been a friend and collaborator for twenty years, terrifically. Aptly, Rituals was recorded at the Boston school's Jordan Hall over three August days in 2025.

Unlike Ives (1874–1954) and Hahn (1874–1947), Bolcom (b. 1938) is with us still; none feels any less contemporary than the others, however. No monitoring of the tracklist is needed to register the change from Ives to Hahn and then Bolcom when the styles (plus the language sung, of course) clearly differentiate one from the next. Rituals begins with the beloved maverick Ives, his prismatic recasting of hymns and folk songs via chromatic treatments and extended tonalities accounted for in the songs featured. His affection for songs emblematic of family, church, and town resonates throughout, no matter how audacious the reinventions might be; however ‘modern' they sound, they never lose their sense of nostalgic ache for days gone by and simpler times. Set to texts by Matthew Arnold, John Bowring, Robert Browning, and Ives himself, the songs are rendered with authority by the recitalists, Choi Stuart unerring and Blaich assured.

Quintessential Ives, “The Things our Fathers Loved” initiates the set grandly, after which “West London” and “From ‘Paracelsus'” are executed with intense fervour. “Tom Sails Away” segues from a sibling's wistful memories of childhood before a discordant quotation from “Over There” suggests Tom's fighting overseas (“In freedom's cause Tom sailed away”) and is now only recoverable through memory. There are a few moments where the soprano's delivery recalls that of Dawn Upshaw's on Five Songs from 1991's John Adams-conducted American Elegies, especially when “Down East” appears on it and Rituals. That said, Choi Stuart and Blaich make these songs their own when the approach adopted for each was considered assiduously.

Their presentation of seven songs from Hahn's Études latines (the translations for their Leconte de Lisle texts by the soprano) effectively transports us to a fin-de-siècle Paris salon where the composer, Proust, and other members of their circle might conceivably be in attendance. Enticing, exotic, and sensuous, the pieces, generally centering on gods and wine, are aromatic confections sung stirringly and exquisitely accompanied. Their treatments are poised and formal in a manner that feels perfectly suited to the material, and songs such as “Lydé,” “Vile potabis,” and “Tyndaris” are totally transfixing.

Whereas Ives's songs include explicit (if refracted) quotations from secondary materials, Bolcom's writing reflects a full absorption of popular American genres. Two of his Cabaret Songs, their texts by Arnold Weinstein, bookend Briefly It Enters, with “Waitin” setting a splendid stage for the cycle when its plodding piano part acts as a natural counterpoint to the lyric. The poems in Briefly It Enters were selected by the composer and Kenyon in the months before her 1995 death at forty-seven. Only two of the nine are late poems (including the brutally unsentimental “The Sick Wife”), however, with four originating from 1986's The Boat of Quiet Hours; the cycle's impact is nevertheless affecting, especially when Kenyon's striking texts (e.g, “Who is it who asks me to find language for the sound a sheep's hoof makes when it strikes a stone?”) are sensitively mirrored by the music. Hear, for instance, the way the piano part suggests the action of a dog bounding through a field (“The Clearing”) or the repetitiveness of daily activities (“Otherwise”); wryly theatrical by comparison is “Man Eating.” The cycle's closing “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks” delivers a series of self-defining “I am…” statements that culminate movingly with “I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name …,” the initial posing of the question “Who” now lucidly answered. From Cabaret Songs, the blues-tinged “Miracle Song” addresses mortality too but this time irreverently.

July 2026