Variations on a Summer Day Reviews
Fanfare
Variations on a Summer Day (2012-16), however, is the main event. This is roughly a half-hour song cycle for mezzo and nine instruments (2 flutes, 2 clarinets, piano, and string quartet). The text is the eponymous 20-part cycle by Wallace Stevens, which in the poet’s usual mix of plainspoken but elusive mysticism, teases meanings out of images and experiences encountered on the Maine coast. Like his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, it’s a series of all-American haiku (and also deals a lot with birds along the way).
It’s understandable how the composer would be drawn to this text. It is vast and ambitious, but also concise and intimate. Its invitation to write twenty jewel-like pieces was, I suspect, irresistible to Meltzer, whose music revels in this intersection of the micro and macro.
The sound of the music is also a bit different from what I’ve known before of his work. While still masterfully orchestrated (making his nonet sound like a full chamber orchestra), I also find its sound more full and blended than earlier pieces, where the juxtaposition of colors was a big point. Also, the harmonic language feels less overtly Stravinskian. The program notes emphasize such as “pre-populist” Copland, early Carter, and other American pantonal music of mid 20th-century. This is true, but I also hear a good deal of English influence as well, especially Tippett, the more lighthearted Maxwell Davies, and Knussen. It’s hard for me to pin down what creates this, but I hear tonally-rooted bass lines, triadic structures that are cubistically altered, and melodies that at times exude a whiff of folksong. There are a few little clues embedded that suggest to me that overtone structures may add to the sense of “naturalness” in the harmony.
The result is music that projects real ambition and a striving for beauty. It effectively spotlights what I consider perhaps the most beautiful vocal type, the mezzo. Meltzer is unafraid to repeat lines for dramatic/interpretive effect, and I applaud his courage, considering how iconic and taut is the original. He’s a scrupulous composer, but not fussy. I feel that all the notes are carefully considered and weighed to count as much as possible at every moment. But the “bagatelle” sequence of the structure projects a lightness of touch, something very in tune with Stevens.
San Francisco Chronicle
In setting Wallace Stevens’ “Variations on a Summer Day,” Meltzer tackles a 20-stanza skein of sensory evocations, memories and ruminations that skitter this way and that, and his writing for chamber group and soprano is vividly responsive. Each strophe creates a distinctive sound world on the fly — now fiercely dissonant, now languid and sweet-toned — and the piece moves from one to the next with quicksilver elusiveness. Anchoring the proceedings are Meltzer’s sure-footed harmonic palette and the subtle eloquence of Abigail Fischer’s singing, which seems to dart over and under Stevens’ words, illuminating them from within.
Voix des Arts
“A setting of verses by American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955), Meltzer’s Variations on a Summer Day discloses a rare affinity for perceiving the inherent song in words and fashioning music that manifests that song for performers and listeners. Stevens’s text is a stream-of-conscious meditation that is not unlike the mature work of writers as seemingly dissimilar as T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, the thoughts within his lines seeming to exist externally, free-standing concepts that are not reasoned but encountered like landmarks along a path. The poet blurred the distinctions between physical and metaphysical, and Meltzer embraces this ambiguity in writing that is at once earthly and ephemeral. Though their musical idioms are very different, there is a familial relationship between the narrator of Variations on a Summer Day and the nameless protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine. Like Poulenc’s incarnation of Jean Cocteau’s surrealistic drama, Variations on a Summer Day is an engrossing exchange with an unheard conversant. Mimicking nature’s cycles, the music imparts a sense of inevitability: rather than beginning and ending with contrived formality, the music rises to the surface for the duration of Variations on a Summer Day and then retreats into silence, waiting to be heard again.
“Under the direction of conductor Jayce Ogren, the musicians to whom performing Variations on a Summer Day for this recording was entrusted play Meltzer’s music with an abiding interpretive spontaneity, vividly limning the score’s tonal unpredictability. Flautists Tara O’Connor and Barry Crawford, clarinetists Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Andrea Schultz, violist Daniel Panner, cellist Greg Hesselink, and pianist Margaret Kampmeierapproach this music with obvious preparation, but their playing is appealingly free from artifice. [In the passages beginning with ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water’ and ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun,’ violinist Cyrus Beroukhim deputizes for Cuckson. That the substitution is indiscernible is a testament to both musicians’ artistic integrity.] Cleanness of execution of the music’s rhythmic transitions is critical to the effectiveness of Variations on a Summer Day, but clinical exactitude would deprive the piece of its improvisational fervor. Guided by the apparent thoroughness of Ogren’s acquaintance with the score’s challenges, this performance is precise without ever being perfunctory.
“It is often as an implicit euphemism for a less-flattering characterization that a singer is said to possess an unique voice, but soprano Abigail Fischer proves to be a peer of Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian, and Jan DeGaetani as a singer with a wholly unique voice in the very best sense. A bright, forward placement of vowels and a flickering vibrato contribute to the fluidity of the soprano’s singing of both Meltzer’s music and Stevens’s words. Moreover, Fischer’s diction is little affected by notorious ‘opera singer English,’ her enunciation refreshingly natural. The exhilaration generated by her voicing of ‘Say of the gulls’ is tempered by the uneasy serenity of her declamation of ‘A music more than a breath.’ Fischer commands the irregular emotional tides of the sequence encompassing ‘The rocks of the cliffs,’ ‘Star over Monhegan,’ and ‘The leaves of the sea’ like a sorceress, wielding the magic of Meltzer’s music with able, assured vocalism.
“A restless energy reminiscent of that found in Dylan Thomas’s poetry courses through ‘It is cold to be forever young,’ its sparks igniting Meltzer’s ingenuity. The music here grows more intense, and Fischer and Ogren sharpen their focus on the composer’s aural imagery. Singer and musicians lend ‘One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls’ a measure of lightness, and the accents of ‘An exercise in viewing the world’ and ‘This cloudy world’ are judiciously matched with the cadences of the words. Meltzer provides music of uncompromising directness for both ‘To change nature’ and ‘Now, the timothy at Pemaquid,’ and these performers give his lines readings of equal earnestness. Fischer sings ‘Everywhere the spruce trees bury soldiers’ with particular eloquence, joining Meltzer in evincing the ambivalence of the text with touching simplicity. Emotional honesty is also the heart of Fischer’s account of ‘Cover the sea with the sand rose,’ the vocal lines of which she sculpts with perfectly-balanced tenderness and toughness.
“‘Words add to the senses’ is an apposite artistic credo for both Meltzer and Wallace Stevens—and for this performance of Variations on a Summer Day. Too often, words seem to stand in the way of today’s composers’ efforts at creating memorable music, but Meltzer seizes the opportunities for sketching familiar but previously unseen vistas offered by Stevens’s words. A near-Baroque sensibility permeates ‘The last island’ and ‘Round and round goes the bell of the water,’ the composer identifying distant vestiges of John Donne in the text, and Fischer sings the music with appropriately ringing tone that would serve her as stylishly in music by Bach or Telemann. Meltzer’s final variations emphasize the parallels between Stevens’s words and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Afforded a chance to demonstrate her dramatic instincts, Fischer sings ‘Pass through the door’ with unaffected sincerity. Her vocalism is impressive throughout the performance, but she saves her best singing for the final three segments, launching the work’s quest for renewal with a searching traversal of ‘Low tide, flat water, sultry sun.’ The strangely disquieting ‘One boy swims under a tub’ and ‘You could almost see the brass on her gleaming’ highlight the perpetuality of Variations on a Summer Day. Instead of proposing a resolution, they suggest an inexorable continuation of the voyage. Fischer, Ogren, and their colleagues eschew ostentatious gestures in Variations’ final pages: their sounds cease, but the music does not end.”
Boston Globe
“[M]ezzo-soprano Quinn Middleman made a similarly persuasive case for Harold Meltzer’s ‘Variations on a Summer Day,’ a gleaming setting of texts from the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name.”
American Record Guide
“The composer takes even the shortest of poems and elongates it into a colorful rush of texture and sound, often summoning up sounds from his ensemble that seem nearly impossible, given its instrumentation. Beautifully performed by soprano Abigail Fischer, this cycle should be programmed more often. It is a joy to listen to.”
Opera News
“Rather than extended musical structures, he offers here sequences of small vignettes, each about a minute or so in duration, one following another. Clearly, the ordering has been carefully thought out. The listener moves from one episode to another, enjoying the many contrasts. It’s the perfect mode for expressing the twenty aphoristically brief verses of the Stevens poem.
“Variations on a Summer Day features soprano Abigail Fischer sounding warm-voiced and heartfelt. She brings the right emotional tone to each of these quite different verses. The musicians of Sequitur, conducted by Jayce Ogren, ably accompany her.”
sequenza21
“Fulmer returned to the podium to conduct Harold Meltzer’s song cycle Variations on a Summer Day, settings of Wallace Stevens. The cycle has grown over time; I saw an earlier performance at Symphony Space that had, if recollection serves, around eight songs. It has since expanded to sixteen. Not only are the Variations longer, they have become more elaborate. There is a use of microtones in the winds that is quite attractive…. It is clear that Meltzer has lived with the poetry for a long time, and his settings of it are imaginative, ranging from terse utterances to attractively varied textures. Those who eschew the morning hour on Sundays at the Festival of Contemporary Music miss out.”
Boston Musical Intelligencer
“He uses music to mirror images in the music, conjuring astonishing gulls at the start…. There’s dramatic invocation… marvelous, soaring, restless a cappella melody…. ”
New Music Buff
“The song cycle, “Variations on a Summer Day” sets poetry by Wallace Stevens and Meltzer’s compositional style seems to be a good fit for Stevens’ poetic style. This work is stylistically very similar to the Piano Quartet with hints of minimalism within a larger somewhat romantic style. It is scored for chamber orchestra with soprano solo. Actually the orchestra is Ensemble Sequitur, a group founded in part by the composer and clearly dedicated to the performance of new music. The members of this group include: Abigail Fischer, soprano, Jayce Ogren, conductor, Tara O’Connor and Barry Crawford, flutes, Alan Kay and Vicente Alexim, clarinets, Margaret Kampmeier, piano, Miranda Cuckson and Andrea Schultz, violins, Daniel Panner, viola, Greg Hesselink, violoncello.
“The poem is by the sometimes obtuse American poet Wallace Stevens. Maybe “obtuse” is the wrong word but Stevens is not the easiest read. What is interesting is how well this composer’s style fits this poetic utterance. This is a lovely song cycle that puts this writer in the mind of Copland’s Dickinson Songs and Barber’s Hermit Songs and perhaps his Knoxville Summer of 1915. There is an air of romantic nostalgia in this tonal and passionate setting.”
Harstad Tidende
Europapremièren av Harold Meltzer verk “Variations on a Summer Day” var først ut. Verket, skrevet i tidommet 2012 til 2016, er basert på et dikt fra 1939 av den amerkanske poeten Wallace Stevens. Den innoldsmessig omfangsrike teksten består av tyve vers av ulik lengde og ble skrevet mens forfatteren var på sommerferie ved kysten i delstaten Maine. Meltzers tonesetting er fantasifull, og verket fremsto allerede fra første tone som tiltalende, ikke minst på grunn av solist Marianne Beate Kiellands solide tolkning av solostemmen. Mezzosopranen med lang fartstid både i Harstad og i ILIOS-festivalen, og som for tiden synger på de aller største scener i verden, har stor elastistet i stemmen. Kombinert med suveren klangbehandling og sterk tekstformidling løftet hun verket høyt, godt hjulpet av et velspillende ensemble. På forhånd hadde dirigent Tim Weiss gitt oss noen verbale knagger å henge teksten på.
The European premiere of Harold Meltzer’s work “Variations on a Summer Day” was first. The work, composed from 2012 to 2016, is based on a poem from 1939 by the American poet Wallace Stevens. The sumptuous text consists of twenty verses of different lengths and was written while the author was on a summer vacation on the coast of Maine. Meltzer’s tone setting is imaginative, and was appealing from the very first note, not least because of soloist Marianne Beate Kielland’s interpretation of the vocal line. The mezzosoprano, a regular both in Harstad and at the ILIOS festival, and who sings on the world’s biggest stages, has a flexible instrument. Combining superb sound with incisive communication of the text, she lifted the work from the page, helped by a playful instrumental ensemble. In advance, conductor Tim Weiss had given us some verbal clues to the text.