Bride of the Island Reviews
Voix des Arts
“A quartet of settings of verses by British poet Ted Hughes, Meltzer’s song cycle Bride of the Island was premièred by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova in 2016. Composer and tenor have fostered a professional relationship not unlike the one between Franz Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl, the baritone whose performances of Schubert’s Lieder motivated the composition of some of the finest songs in the canon. In his performances on Songs and Structures, Appleby sings Meltzer’s songs as though both music and words are his own, instinctively fusing his vocalism with Katyukova’s versatile pianism. From the first bar of ‘Reveille,’ tenor and pianist entwine their instruments with shared awareness of aural textures.
“Meltzer traced the narrative trajectory of ‘Reveille’ in music of absorbing simplicity, and Appleby deftly manages the ascents to Gs and A♭s above the stave. Katyukova articulates the swirling aquatic figurations that cascade through ‘Sugar Loaf’ with rhythmic exactness that propels but never hurries the performance. ‘The water is wild as alcohol’ is among Hughes’s most evocative lines, and Meltzer seized the opportunity of its musical potential by crafting a vocal line that enhances the words’ histrionic strength. It is the tenor’s lyricism that illuminates the paradoxes of ‘Thistles.’ His direct enunciation of ‘Every one a revengeful burst of resurrection’ reveals the poetic erudition of Meltzer’s treatment of the text. Appleby and Katyukova perform ‘Hay’ with a suggestion of cynicism that reaches its—and the cycle’s—climax in the line ‘Her heart is the weather.’ The disquieting honesty of Appleby’s delivery of the words ‘She loves nobody’ infuses Meltzer’s subtle musical prosody with startling immediacy. The contrast of the passage taking the tenor to top A, sung triumphantly as stipulated by the composer’s instructions, with the song’s ‘ghostly’ resolution ends Bride of the Island with a glimmer of deceptive serenity.”
Opera News
Bride of the Island (2016), a setting of four poems by the celebrated English poet Ted Hughes, is equally vivid. “Reveille,” a nuanced retelling of the encounter between Adam, Eve and the Serpent, is written in a clever, meandering style. “Sugar Loaf” is a paean to a mountain stream, slowly and undetectably devouring its host as it carries sediment down to a receptive pool. “Thistles” depicts the eternal struggle between weeds and farmers with an appropriately spiky texture. Meltzer saves the best for last with “Hay,” in which the development of the plant serves as an analogy for the maturation of a girl into womanhood and marriage. Both the vocal line and the piano writing become richer and more far-reaching as the story develops in a subtle, not blatantly obvious way.
The Art Music Lounge
“In fact, these songs put me in mind of some of Samuel Barber’s best work, which I like very much. “Thistles” is the most dramatic song of the group, with strong, roiling piano chords at the beginning whose harmonies are a bit reminiscent of Bartók.”
Journal of Singing
“With Bride of the Island, he responds strongly to the stimulus of Ted Hughes’s poetry (from Collected Poems, Ted Hughes, 2003). Meltzer has created here a beautiful set of lyric songs for a tenor voice possessing warmth and presence in the lower register, as well as ease in the upper. The collaboration of piano and voice is exquisite; although the writing for the instrument is spare and transparent, Meltzer weaves the two together in a way that creates gorgeous sonorities and effective emotional connections with the “savage gift” of British poet laureate Ted Hughes.
“The first song, “Reveille,” creates an atmosphere of wry trepidation, evoking pictures of the serpent, and of Adam and Eve, in the ruined garden, with ominous sixteenth note patterns in the accompaniment at the beginning and the end. The abrupt changes harmonically and texturally as the scene changes to a larger view of Eden and the future Earth, crushed by the serpent’s coils and “the black, thickening river of his body,” are menacingly conveyed. The tessitura in “Sugar Loaf” is punishing in the beginning (although marked “effortless”), but soon drops to a low murmur, below the staff, where the composer manages to create a mesmerizing harmonic shimmer for the piano and voice. In “Thistles,” Meltzer begins and ends the song with short sharp note clusters in the piano, and a vocal line that remains in the middle voice until the unrestrained fury of the poem re- quires it to rise, “Mown down . . . their sons [the thistles] appear Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.” The final song, “Hay,” is simple, and simply beautiful, the piano providing an obbligato-like response to the rhapsodic vocal line. Hughes’s poem is well served in this setting, in turn ecstatic and bucolic, wistful and passionate. In all these songs, his use of colorful adjectives (“writhing,” “ebbing,” “floating,” “bright, crafty,” “carefree,” “vaporous,” are a few) as musical direction for both the piano and the voice is wonderfully powerful and vivid. The writing for both is challenging, but never self-consciously so. Meltzer’s writing for both instruments, voice and piano, requires expert musicianship and technique. The result is a wonderful composite of text and vocal beauty.”