Albany Symphony adds two discs to recorded output

Music of Aaron Jay Kernis, George Tsontakis featured

A CD on Albany Records has music by Aaron Jay Kernis and performances by soprano Talise Trevigne from the 2012 and 2016 American Music Festivals. Trevigne is becoming a favorite of contemporary composers and has been heard frequently in our area. She played Bess this past summer in the Glimmerglass Festival production of “Porgy and Bess” and she appears on the ASO’s disc of music by Christopher Rouse, which was nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award.

There’s a depth and wisdom to Trevigne’s singing. Her voice is both warm and austere. These qualities add a certain groundedness to the two large compositions by Kernis.

A pervasive theme to Kernis’ works is mysticism and transcendence. This is most apparent in “Simple Songs,” which opens the disc. Its five movements are settings of various inspirational texts, including a couple of rather free-form psalm translations by Stephen Mitchell. Despite his title, Kernis’ writing here is still sophisticated, just not busy or overly complex. Sometimes he takes the orchestra in unexpected directions, as when a setting of Rumi’s earthy and philosophical poems take on high pitched urgency in the fourth movement.

On top of his simplified language, Kernis probably named the collection “Simple” because of the emotional character of the songs. The composer’s heart really opens during the finale, which was written shortly after the death of Leonard Bernstein and is dedicated to him. The music deliberately evokes Mahler, an appropriate language to salute Bernstein. It can’t be a coincidence that “Simple Song” (singular) is a Bernstein work, the opening aria to his 1971 Mass.

“Valentines” is a more varied and narrative kind of music and features texts by the British poet Carol Ann Duffy. To quote Duffy, the piece is “not a cute card or a kiss-o-gram.” The poems are unexpectedly funny and frequently concerned with the temporal stuff of living on Earth, which cues Kernis into some word painting. The third movement, “Mrs. Midas,” at 11 minutes in duration, is more like a monodrama or a scene from an opera.

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