photo by Peter Mueller
Paul Appleby
...........................................................................................

The New York Festival of Song's (NYFOS) final program for the season, at Merkin Concert Hall, on May 4 (and 6), focused on, as its title, "The Newest Deal," indicated, new and newer music, including two complete song cycles, one a world premiere. NYFOS' incomparable founders Steven Blier, the Artistic Director, and Michael Barrett, the Associate Artistic Director, were at the Steinways, and the talented trio of singers comprised Anne-Carolyn Bird, singing in a lovely soprano; Paul Appleby, the accomplished tenor; and Andrew Garland, baritone, given some oddball figures to portray and doing it frighteningly convincingly.

With Blier at the piano, Appleby lent his ingratiating lyric instrument to debuting cycle "Beautiful Ohio," Harold Meltzer's setting of poems by late writer and teacher James Arlington Wright. Songs of haunting beauty and profound alienation make up this striking and disturbing work, its words those of an inveterate outsider, both in homeland and abroad. "Small Frogs Killed on the Highway," the opening song, concerns taking chances, whatever the cost. In "Little Marble Boy," the speaker identifies, in his loneliness, with a statue on a font, in a cathedral. The 'title song' is the quietly intense expression of someone with a very different Weltanschauung, finding beauty even in a polluted Midwestern river, the same outlook making him, in "Caprice," sense hostility emanating from trees in Italy. The cycle ends, in "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," with an intriguing, almost erotic image of high school football players, the lines-"Their sons grow suicidally beautiful/At the beginning of October/And gallop terribly against each other's bodies"-sung caressingly by Appleby.

Young Gabriel Kahane's wild and woolly "Craigslistlieder" (2006) was the other complete cycle programmed, sung mostly by Garland, with Blier at the keyboard. Texts Kahane employed were authentic Craigslist ads, set verbatim, with spelling and grammatical quirks intact, and some who placed the ads, portrayed as quite whacked out. "You Looked Sexy (even though)" showed Garland seeking for someone he aided, as he or she was having a seizure. An insistently and increasingly apologetic Appleby sang "I'm Sorry (I masturbated on your IKEA catalogue)" to strains of a romantic waltz, before tapering off into fragmented phrases. Take me as I am, flaws and all, was the tone of "Neurotic and Lonely," with Garland in manic mode. Bird and Blier beautifully conveyed the sentiments of "Half a Box of Condoms" as if entrusted with a Romantic lied or aria, with all the passion of Schubert or Puccini. Garland was way out there as the writer of "Today I met the messenger of God," who was "selling M&Ms on the F train"-or was it God, Himself, that he found there? The next song, dear to my heart even before I heard it, was Garland's lilting "For Trade: Assless Leather Chaps," in "Perfect condition," with just "barely noticible [sic] stickiness"! Garland, assisted by Appleby in the refrain, played the speaker in "Two Years Ago, My Sister and I (went from NY to Catskills)," who seemed to fancy himself composer of an incredibly insightful rock improvisation, as he groped for the elusive name of a condiment. The baritone, assisted by soprano and tenor, made of "Opera Scene" ("$550-Huge room available-with a twist!") a classic gran scena, complete with lofty recitatives, cavatinas and cabalettas, coloratura and falsetto, and rhapsodizing on the words "ice cubes," as he oozed, "I have a compulsion to put ice cubes down people's shirts."

The singers and Barrett probed three excerpts from Russell Platt's "From Noon to Starry Night: A Walt Whitman Cantata" (2006), with the trio in slightly angular nocturne "A Clear Midnight;" Bird's dulcetly sung "Paumanok," paean to an idyllic Long Island of the past; and the vocalists harmonizing in "A Sketch," limning "a solitary form" mourning a love lost long ago. In Lisa Bielawa's settings of poems from Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Lay of the Love and Death (of Cornet Christopher Rilke)" (2006), set during wartime, Garland, with Barrett, explored, in "I Carry the Flag," a soldier's proud, but fearful communiqué to his mother, and in the quieter "Tower Room," the loneliness of people after warmth and affection, but eschewing learning much personal information. In Phil Kline's "Rumsfeld Songs"-and who knew the former Secretary of Defense had a poetic bone in his body?-Bird, Barrett and Blier probed, with due earnestness, Donald Rumsfeld's obfuscation, bordering on, nay, surpassing absurdity, in the mind-and tongue-twisting lines of "As We Know (there are known knowns)" (2007) and "Near Perfect Clarity (as to what it is, and it will be known to you)" (2010).

Assisted by Blier, Bird also lavished beautiful soprano tone on Raymond Lustig's peaceful "Velvet Shoes" (2007), adapted from an Elinor Wylie poem. Assisted by Barrett, Garland, with startling vehemence, tackled the trills and quasi-trills; regularly irregular, almost ritualistically rising and falling vocal line; and pitched speech of selections from "Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea" (2004), a work still in progress, by Peruvian-Chinese-Lithuanian Jewish-American composer Gabriela Lena Frank, getting in touch with her Latina roots, to verses, in Spanish, by Nicaraguan poet Pablo Antonio Cuadra, eliciting virtuoso efforts from both singer and pianist. Frank's songs, "El Nacimiento de Cifar" (The Birth of Cifar), "XXII. Primer parte: Eufemia," and "XXII. Segundo parte: En la Vela del Angelito" (At the Wake of the little Angel), depicted a sea every bit as terrible and awesome as that in Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes." Finally, the singers, with Barrett, harmonized on the mysterious "The Book," from "Secrets" (2002), with music by Tom Cipullo and words by Linda Pastan, replete with metaphors for death.

Tickets for NYFOS concerts, priced from $40 to 55, are available at www.kaufman-center.org, by calling 212/501-3330, or by going to the box office at 129 West 67th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. A limited number of student tickets, at $15, are available by telephoning NYFOS at 646/230-8380. NYFOS' season at Merkin resumes on October 19 and continues through May 5, 2011. Visit www.nyfos.org for further information.