Beautiful Ohio Reviews
The New York Times
“Harold Meltzer’s elegant Beautiful Ohio, settings of five poems by James Arlington Wright, received its premiere….”
“Meltzer’s cycle was performed compellingly by the fine young tenor Paul Appleby and Mr. Blier. Wright, who died in 1980, was a native of Martins Ferry, Ohio, a steel town. He had an advanced education and moved in cultured circles but felt like an outsider all his life. The poems Mr. Meltzer selected include two taken from Wright’s sojourns in Italy and three aching ruminations on Ohio.
“In Beautiful Ohio, titled after the third song in the cycle, Mr. Meltzer proves an acute reader of Wright’s poems. In the first song, Small Frogs Killed on the Highway, the poet is disturbed yet impressed, in a way, by the sight of determined frogs leaping across a country road at night, some dying under the tires of passing cars. Mr. Meltzer captures the ambiguity of Wright’s attitude in his fitful music. The vocal lines are direct and austere; the piano teems with rustling figurations and sputtering chords.
“In Caprice Wright explains that when he tires of people in Italy, he focuses on trees. Mr. Meltzer counters the dark sarcasm of the isolated poet by having the piano almost, but never quite, echo the vocal line in spiraling unison octaves.
“The most bitterly beautiful song is the last, Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio, which depicts the mood in a small Ohio town after a Friday night high school football game. There is riveting tension between the somberly elegaic vocal writing and the heaving piano part, thick with grating precisely textured chords. Mr. Appleby’s warm, strong yet subtle singing made every word a living presence, supported by Mr. Blier’s nuanced playing.”
Opera News
Beautiful Ohio (2010) is a setting of five poems of James Wright. Wright’s formal education ended at the eighth grade, but he developed great skill as a poet, receiving many scholarships and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. A depressive, reclusive man, Wright grew up feeling alienated in a smallish town in southeast Ohio. Meltzer selected three poems about life in Ohio, interspersed with two poems about Italy, a country Wright loved but in which he felt like an outsider.
Meltzer’s music is quite varied and evocative. His writing for the piano mirrors the approach Schubert employed in his great lieder cycles. The piano part is more than accompaniment: it serves as commentary on the text and picturesquely depicts the physical setting described in the poem. This approach was most colorful in the two Italian poems—“Little Marble Boy,” in which the piano depicts the well of holy water over which a statue presides, and “Caprice,” a playful song depicting the poet’s fantasy that the trees he admires are in fact spirits that ultimately will return to human form. In the middle song, “Beautiful Ohio,” Meltzer offers a close approximation of popular song as he depicts Wright’s meditation on his hometown. These three are bookended by “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,” a bleak meditation on life that’s attracted to suicide, and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” in which Wright comes to peace with the blue-collar worker families who live (and are basically trapped) in his hometown.
qmetropolis
“With [Steve] Blier at the piano, [Paul] 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.”
[Q]onStage
“Kyle Bielfield had the honor of performing Harold Meltzer’s settings of James Wright’s selections from Beautiful Ohio. The poems resonate with me, as Wright seems to be creating poetry about the portion of Ohio that is literally a stone’s throw from West Virginia, and that’s where I spent my college days. When Bielfield began to sing, his smooth tenor caressed Wright’s paean to the state that he loved and didn’t. The emotions Meltzer and Bielfield evoke with the music and Wright’s lyrics on Small Frogs killed on the Highway, and the image of the final line–a technique for which Wright is famous–of tadpoles dancing on a quarter moon and not yet being able to see what awaits them is both a blessing and a curse, as well as a thought-provoking ending of a song. Followed by the bluesy and urban sound of Beautiful Ohio and then the darkly clear-eyed nostalgia of Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, the songs give Bielfield the opportunity to use his soaring, sinuous tenor as he bent the notes to his will. [Host Russell] Platt spoke of Brooklyn-born Meltzer as having an urban perspective that portrays the patience of life in the Midwest so clearly, and the clarity is stunning.”
Voix des Arts
“It is not difficult to conclude from a superficial survey of the history of Art Song that American music lacks a complementary literary tradition liked that of German Lieder, shaped by poets of the order of Goethe, Heine, and Schiller. Such a conclusion, however misguided, cannot be wholly rejected, but its validity is substantially reduced by works such as Meltzer’s Beautiful Ohio. The composer found in the poems by James Wright from which Beautiful Ohio’s texts are drawn an economy of words with layers of meaning that, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and the works of William Blake, reveal different truths to each observer. Beautiful Ohio shares with Schubert’s Winterreise an ambivalence about coping with loss, but it is Brahms’s adaptations of biblical texts in his Vier ernste Gesänge that Meltzer’s emotionally-charged treatments of Wright’s words most closely parallels.
“Appleby premièred Beautiful Ohio in 2010, and he and Katyukova prove in the performance on Songs and Structures to be as musically and dramatically well-matched in this music as in Bride of the Island. The vivid imagery of the opening song, ‘Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,’ as bizarrely poignant as its title intimates, is communicated assertively but without exaggerated pathos. Appleby and Katyukova approach ‘Little Marble Boy’ reverently, as though performing the song in the hollow, hallowed space conjured in Wright’s poem, their sounds demonstrating the skill with which Meltzer instilled the mood of the text in his music. In ‘Beautiful Ohio,’ the tenor voices ‘I know what we call it / Most of the time’ with particular eloquence, echoing the wariness that haunts the music.
“In all of these songs, Katyukova’s playing provides a second voice, not disinterested accompaniment, and her technical mastery of Meltzer’s writing for the piano allows her to focus on nuances of phrasing that reinforce details of her colleague’s interpretation, not least in ‘Caprice.’ Untroubled by the tricky chromatic writing centered in the passaggio, Appleby voices ‘The trouble is / They keep turning faces toward me / That I recognize’ confidently. He and Katyukova boldly stride through the demands of ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,’ unflinchingly confronting the ambiguities of both music and text. Though there is no real stylistic kinship between the works, the emotional currents by which the narrator’s journey in Beautiful Ohio is transported recall the bittersweet integration of thankfulness and sorrow at the core of the music composed by Henry Purcell for the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1695. The philosophical threads that bind words to music in Beautiful Ohio are more tangled than those woven into Purcell’s music, but Meltzer’s songs are no less reliant than any others upon performers’ prowess. Beautiful Ohio and Bride of the Island could be performed differently but surely no better than by Appleby and Katyukova on this disc.”