Just when the pandemic winter was beginning to get old, we took the drive to St. Paul to attend a noon Courtroom Concert sponsored by the Schubert Club. They had corralled one of the region's outstanding interpreters of art song, mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, to perform the world premier of four song cycles written by equally stellar local composers David Evan Thomas and Libby Larsen. As an added treat, the text of two of the four cycles drew upon poems by the late, great local poet, Louis Jenkins.
It's customary on such occasions to dwell on the international Kudos of the artists in question. For example, Clara was the first American prize winner at Thomas Quasthoff's International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany back in 2017. But these artists have been with us for a while, and the event, fuelled by host—and also distinguished composer—Abbie Betinis's irrepressible enthusiasm, had a distinctly joyous yet also a down-home feel, as if a bunch of kids, after spending hours cooped up in their rooms, had finally been given permission to go out and play.
Although I don't know any of these artists personally, I felt like I did. After all, Libby Larsen was my T.A. for a music history class decades ago. And at one of Clara's recitals on the U campus, I said to the woman passing out brochures, who was concerned about the performer's immediate whereabouts, "You seem to know Clara quite well."
"I guess I do," she replied. "I'm her mother."
Clara added a new chapter to this sense of neighborhood familiarity, shallow though it may be, at the recital, when Abbie asked her to explain why a poem by an obscure poet, Henry Lorentzen, had been set to music.
"Libby asked me to choose a poem for her, and I picked that one. I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, and when I was nine I saw it framed on the kitchen wall of a neighbor's house one day. I copied it down, word for word, and have kept that sheet of paper ever since...And I have it right here!" She grinned as she held up an unlined sheet of coarse paper on which you could see, even from the tenth row of chairs, several uneven lines of child-like block letters, in pencil.
May I an Artist Be?
Master of the sky and earth,
May I an artist be;
That I may catch the spell of lands,
And of the billowed sea?
Guide my erring hand at times
If it does not present, the charm
Of youth or silver hair,
As truthful as is meant.
May I preserve upon the wall
The strong, the fleet, the meek.
Or flowered landscape with
A home - it is for this I seek.
Her dream has come true. The rich, dark, and often haunting timbre of Clara's voice was a pleasure to listen to throughout. And the fresh and bracing mood of the recital was enhanced by the natural fluidity of the art song form itself, in which the vocal line is typically relieved somewhat from the constraints of harmonic integration, often weaving and bobbing to convey the meaning of a piece of text or the patterns of human speech, while the piano accompaniment not only maintains the "field" but also adds color and programmatic detail. For example, in the first song in Libby's North Shore cycle, delicate pianistic flourishes seemed to evoke the lines
Steam rises from our bodies
and forms high, thin clouds
that go racing past the moon over the lake
Before Clara performed his cycle "Children of the Night," David provided some details about the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote the poems involved. David also reminded us of what a niche form the art song is, and how rare and pleasing it was to have an artist of Clara's caliber actually perform it.
For me, the most shocking moment in the show was when Abby asked how many people in the audience were familiar with Louis Jenkins' work. Out of perhaps a hundred guests, no more than six or seven people raised their hands. That's a shame. Almost unbelievable. It's rare that I head north on vacation without throwing one or another of Louis's books into the book bag: The Winter Road, Sea Smoke, Just Above Water, North of the Cities, Before You Know It. Titles pulled off the shelf at random. A good place to begin exploring his work would be Where Your House is Now: New and Selected Poems, published by Nodin Press in 2019, the year he died.
Louis was a master of the prose poem, humorous and droll, fatigued and wonder-struck, likely to veer off from the subject at hand in a new direction following a logic both natural and obscure. But that dead-pan humor is lost when sung in a lovely, leaping female voice. I loved the music, but quit following the text, because I heard little of Louis's wise and weary humor in the sparkling leaps and bounds.
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