FEIGIN Vocal and Chamber Works
Some composers announce themselves with a manifesto. Joel Feigin just writes songs — good ones, patiently made, and this two-disc survey from North/South Consonance finally gives listeners enough of them to take the measure of a genuinely individual voice that has been hiding, in plain sight, on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara for years while the new-music world chased louder game.
The vocal writing is the spine of this set, and rightly so. First Tragedy, from 1982 (revised a decade later), sets a Vietnamese poet’s response to that war’s atrocities for soprano, clarinet, and piano — an unglamorous trio, but Feigin makes it sound inevitable, the clarinet curling around the voice like smoke that won’t clear. He moves between sung line and Sprechgesang without any sense of gear-shifting; tonal and atonal harmony coexist the way grief and composure do in an actual human face. It is slow music, mostly, and I mean that as praise. Feigin does not rush toward catharsis.
The Eight Japanese Poems (1983) go the other direction entirely — soprano and harp, spare as a woodblock print, each setting over almost before you’ve settled into it. I found myself thinking of Edmund Rubbra’s The Jade Mountain, another haiku-scaled cycle where less is emphatically more, and Feigin’s set holds its own in that company, which is no small compliment.
Then things widen out. The Four Poems of Wallace Stevens (1985, touched up in 1996) bring in flute, percussion, cello, and piano — Feigin’s own description, “a dramatic evocation of its text,” undersells how sharply the instrumental color tracks Stevens’s shifting weather, wit curdling into melancholy and back. The Four Poems of Linda Pastan (1987) push further into expressionist territory, all jagged edges and Sprechgesang until the final song, “We Come to Silence,” arrives and simply… stops fighting. It’s the most quietly devastating four minutes on either disc. And Five Ecstatic Poems of Kabir (1989), setting the fifteenth-century Sufi mystic, is the sunniest of the cycles — lyrical, open-voweled, though even here shadows pass over the field.
What unites all five cycles is a kind of instinct — you sense a composer who reads poetry the way singers breathe, phrase by phrase, never imposing a system on a text that doesn’t want one. The ensembles are small throughout, never quite chamber-orchestra scale, and Feigin resists the temptation to pad them out. Sparse, yes. Minimalist, no — there’s real harmonic motion under the surface, it just doesn’t announce itself with a bass drum.
The instrumental works round out the portrait nicely, though they inhabit a lighter emotional register. Veränderungen (1995) for violin and piano turns out to be a substantial theme-and-variations, more argument than mood piece. The Four Fantasy Pieces (1987) for flute and piano show Feigin at play — genuinely charming, and a smart addition to a flute repertoire that could always use one more good piece that isn’t Poulenc’s Sonata. Nexus (1996), also flute and piano, tips its hat to Bach; enjoyable, if — I’ll say it — the slightest item on the program, more well-made than necessary.
Two works, though, hit harder than anything else here. Transience, for oboe and percussion, wears a title Feigin himself dismisses (rightly) as “New Age bromide” — the music is anything but placid, restless and nervy for long stretches before it earns its closing calm, and earns it is the operative phrase. And Echoes from the Holocaust (1993), for oboe, viola, and piano, builds variations on what Feigin calls an “idealized Jewish folk song,” drawn from melodic fragments left by two songs written by victims of the camps. It could have been unbearable, or worse, grandiose. It’s neither. Feigin keeps the scale intimate and the gestures plain, and the restraint is exactly what makes it land — no false grandeur, no easy uplift, just three instruments working through something too large for orchestration to fix.
That restraint, actually, is the through-line of the whole set — you feel it’s connected to Feigin’s long engagement with Buddhist thought, though he’s never so unsubtle as to say so in the music itself. Nothing here reaches for spectacle. Everything here trusts the listener.
The performances, drawn from North/South Consonance’s regular stable of new-music specialists, are dedicated rather than glamorous — intonation occasionally a shade less than immaculate in the more exposed vocal lines, ensemble balance sometimes favoring clarity over bloom. But these are musicians who plainly believe in this composer, and that conviction covers a lot of small sins. There is no rival disc of most of this repertoire to weigh against it; Feigin has been underrecorded relative to his gifts, and that alone makes this set valuable.
Two discs, ninety-some minutes, no filler. A composer worth knowing better, and a label that deserves credit for making the introduction possible.
