Lifschitz: Of Bondage and Freedom

Max Lifschitz has spent so many years championing other people’s music through North/South Consonance that it would be easy to forget he composes at all. The new disc under that ensemble’s imprint corrects the oversight. His Of Bondage and Freedom, dating from 1991, is the most quietly devastating thing here, a work built from silence and near-silence as much as from notes.

It opens with “Premonitions,” solo violin alone in the room, spinning out an elegy that owes something to the unaccompanied Bach sonatas in its bare-boned intensity but sounds like nothing so much as itself — thin-toned, questioning, refusing resolution. Then comes “A Cartload of Shoes,” Abraham Sutzkever’s Yiddish text for soprano and violin only, and here the instrumental writing shadows the voice like a second conscience. The Yiddish itself carries weight, guttural, mournful, a language built for lament long before the Holocaust made lament its primary business. Lifschitz never underlines. He trusts the words.

Czeslaw Milosz’s “Campo di Fiori,” the Roman square where Giordano Bruno burned, invoked by Milosz as he watched the Warsaw ghetto burn from outside its walls, gets a fuller treatment: soprano joined now by violin and piano together, text sliding between Polish and English translation within a single arc. The Sprechstimme passages land with real dramatic point, not as modish gesture but as the voice breaking under the weight of what it has to say. “Remembrance,” instrumental again, threads a Yiddish folk tune through a passing quotation of Schumann, a composer who knew something about hearing voices from elsewhere, and the effect is genuinely haunting, gone almost before you register it. “Libera Me” closes the cycle with Job set alongside Milosz and Sutzkever, three languages of suffering braided into one. It is, finally, a memorial piece, and an unusually honest one. No bombast. No easy consolation.

Everything else on the program lives in its shadow, though not without merit of its own.

Raoul Pleskow’s Two Arabesques, from 1988, is craftsman’s music, a diptych for mixed chamber forces, contrapuntal lines woven with the fussy precision of someone who has spent a career teaching composition, which Pleskow did, for decades, at C. W. Post. Tonal and atonal elements sit side by side without apology. It doesn’t aim to move you. It aims to satisfy, in the manner of a well-turned argument, and mostly it does.

Laura Greenberg contributes two pieces of sharply different temperament. La Vida Es Sueño draws on Calderón’s great soliloquy, the Spanish Baroque’s answer to Hamlet’s brooding, life as dream, dream as prison, set for soprano and six players with a restraint that suits the text’s philosophical chill. “This Man Was Your Brother,” the earlier Kenneth Patchen setting from 1979, throws three percussionists into a seven-player ensemble and the results jump and clatter with nervous, quickly shifting moods. Greenberg clearly hears percussion as color first, rhythm second, and the piece is the livelier for it.

Charles Dvorak’s Amandla Mandela!, from 1991, is the disc’s most frustrating entry, and I say that as someone sympathetic to its aims. For the first extended stretch, narrator and timpani alone, Mandela’s own words carrying the weight, the piece functions as melodrama in the old sense, closer to the “Spring Offensive” movement of Bliss’s Morning Heroes than to anything in the American concert tradition. Then Coltrane’s “Alabama” creeps in underneath, subtly at first, gathering presence as the narration continues, eventually breaking into a brief jazz-inflected episode with percussion well to the fore. The instrumental writing, when it finally arrives in force, is plain and affecting. You wish there were three times as much of it. Dvorak seems to have trusted the spoken word over the music at every turn where the opposite trust was warranted. Sincerity is not in question. Judgment, perhaps, is.

The performances throughout are alert, unfussy, with no interpretive vanity getting between the listener and the score. The soprano soloist (the notes are thin on individual credits, alas) navigates the Yiddish, Polish, and Sprechstimme demands of the Lifschitz with real security, no small feat. Engineering is close and clean, occasionally too close for the quieter instrumental passages, which lose a little bloom.

This is not a disc for the general collector hunting familiar repertoire. But anyone curious about the byways of American composition since 1980, the small ensembles, the university-adjacent composers, the persistent tradition of setting difficult twentieth-century texts to difficult twentieth-century music, will find genuine rewards here, chief among them Lifschitz’s own quietly remarkable cycle. Seek it out for that alone.