AMN Reviews: Douglas Boyce – The Bird Is an Alphabet [New Focus Recordings fcr387]

From Washington, D.C. composer Douglas Boyce, The Bird Is an Alphabet is an album of three sets of works for voice in various settings. For one of these sets Boyce has chosen the conventional voice-and-piano setting, while the other two feature more unusual orchestrations. The first three tracks are taken from Boyce’s A Book of Songs, scored for tenor voice and piano (on this recording, Robert Baker and Molly Orlando, respectively), which sets texts by various poets and philosophers. The three pieces included here are well within the tradition of Western art song and feature poems by Jorie Graham, Wallace Stevens, and B. J. Ward. On Ward’s contribution, “The Apple Orchard in October,” Boyce elicits an autumnal mood by framing the text in dark harmonies and drawing the words out in long, brooding lines. Scriptorium, a setting of four texts from poet Melissa Range’s 2016 book of that title, was written for the duo of soprano Corrine Byne and trumpeter Andy Kozar – a challengingly spare combination of voices. Boyce’s scoring, which alludes to the modality and contrapuntalism of early music, not only effectively exploits the possibilities available to two single-line instruments, but fittingly matches the medieval theme that informs Range’s poetry. Range’s own graceful handling of language’s consonances and fluid rhythms would seem to lend itself to melodic writing and plays no small part in the success of these pieces. The final set of pieces is Ars Poetica, written for the fine contemporary chamber ensemble counter)induction (Daniel Lippel, guitar; Nurit Pacht, violin; Caleb van der Swaagh, cello) and poet Marlanda Dekine. This nine-part work consists of five settings of Dekine’s poems, read here by the poet, alternating with four instrumental interludes. Boyce underscores the drama and rhetorical force of Dekine’s words by contrasting the poet’s evenly measured speech rhythms with the ensemble’s darting along in skittish counterpoint or breaking up into fragmentary motifs.

Daniel Barbiero