Gordon: Silver Rain and Genius Child – Cabell

Langston Hughes has been set to music more often than he’s been read closely, and that’s not entirely a compliment to composers. There’s a whole shelf of American song built on Hughes’s plainspoken, blues-inflected lines — Margaret Bonds got there first and best, with an authority born of friendship and shared idiom — and Ricky Ian Gordon’s two Hughes cycles, recorded here with the composer at the keyboard and soprano Nicole Cabell out front, arrive as the latest attempt to find the music already hiding inside those poems.

Gordon is a canny, sophisticated theater animal. His opera Grapes of Wrath proved that. He knows how to let a piano talk when a voice is only saying half of what’s meant. “Harlem Night Song” swings, genuinely, the left hand loose-limbed and syncopated like a rehearsal-room trio vamping between takes. “Port Town” has a saloon-door swagger to it, hips rather than head. And “Song for a Dark Girl” — Hughes’s terrible, quiet lynching poem, the one that makes “Strange Fruit” feel almost restrained by comparison — gets a setting that resists melodrama, letting a slow blues tread do the devastating work. Gordon does not oversell it. That restraint is the finest thing on this disc.

Elsewhere the show-tune reflex creeps in, and it’s a reflex, not a strategy. “Joy” wants to button up bright and Broadway. “Dream Variations,” with its uncomfortable black-night-white-day binary that read as playful uplift in 1926 and reads as something else now, gets a buoyant, faintly cabaret setting that doesn’t quite know what to do with the poem’s dated racial theater. You sense Gordon reaching past the text’s problems rather than through them. Not every composer needs profundity in the poem. But Hughes’s slighter lyrics, and there are plenty in this song-a-day poet’s enormous output, expose a composer’s habits more than they inspire fresh ones.

The Genius Child cycle, ten songs long, is the more ambitious undertaking, and the more uneven. “To Be Somebody” earns its keep: the piano writing takes its cue from the poem’s own reference to piano-playing, a nice bit of word-painting that doesn’t call attention to itself. “Strange Hurt” moves in a slow habanera sway, sultry and a little sinister. “My People” drifts on suspended, unresolved harmonies that Gordon handles with real sensitivity. You want the pedal held a beat longer, and he obliges. But “Prayer,” at five minutes the cycle’s emotional center of gravity, sags. Gordon can’t quite resist padding a good idea into a long one.

Then there’s the singing, and here I confess disappointment verging on bafflement. Nicole Cabell won Cardiff in 2005, a major credential, and I’ve admired her lyric soprano elsewhere, a plush, Italianate instrument that seemed made for Massenet and Puccini. Here that plushness works against her. The vibrato has an odd wobble at sustained volumes, not consistently, but often enough to notice and then to dread. Diction turns to mush exactly where Hughes’s vernacular needs consonantal bite: “Harlem,” “blues,” the hard-edged Americanisms that Odetta or Leontyne Price would have snapped off cleanly. Cabell sings these songs the way she might sing Mimì, full voice, generalized ache, opera-house projection, when what they want is something closer to a chanteuse leaning into a microphone, or a hymn singer who has actually sat in a Harlem pew.

Gordon’s own piano playing, meanwhile, is the disc’s real protagonist: alert, idiomatic, alive to the blues inflections that his vocal writing sometimes only gestures toward. I’d rather hear him accompany someone else. Or accompany himself, singing. Composers are often the best interpreters of their own vocal lines, uneven artistry and all, because they know exactly where the weight goes.

A mixed record, then: some genuinely fine songwriting undercut by a mismatched interpreter and, at moments, Gordon’s own susceptibility to easy charm over harder truths. Worth hearing for “Song for a Dark Girl” and “My People” alone. Not a first choice for anyone new to Gordon’s gifts, and not, in the end, the Hughes album this repertoire still deserves.