The Billy Collins Suite, Songs Inspired by his Poetry = PIERRE JALBERT: “The Invention of the Saxophone”; STACY GARROP: “Ars Poetica”; VIVIAN FUNG: “Insomnia,” “The Man in the Moon,” “The Willies”; LITA GRIER: “Forgetfulness,” “Dancing Toward Bethlehem”; ZHOU TIAN: “Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles” – Steve Robinson, narrator/ Buffy Baggott, mezzo-soprano/ Jonathan Beyer, baritone/ Tim Munro, flute/ John Bruce Yeh, clarinet/ Susan Cook, saxophone/ Desirée Ruhstrat, violin/ Joel Link, viola/ David Cunliffe, cello/ Nuiko Wadden, harp/ Yuko Yamada-Selvaggio and Marta Aznavorian, pianos – Cedille Records CDR 90000 115 54:45 ***1/2 [Distr. by Naxos]:
Two-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins has produced so much verse that he sometimes seems like a poetry machine, yet he continues to amuse and enlighten in about equal measure. The amusing bit is what has contributed to his unusual success with the reading public; many American novelists would be envious of both his audience and his advances. In fact, as serious as some of the poetry on the present disc is, it would have been almost impossible not to include examples of Collins’s guffaw-inducing verse as well.
The Billy Collins Suite is a project of Chicago’s Music in the Loft chamber series, which commissioned the five composers involved. The unifying elements, lending credibility to the designation of “suite,” are that all pieces involve the poetry of Billy Collins, all involve the voice, and all are accompanied by chamber-music forces. But the five composers approach the project differently. Three—Jalbert, Fung, and Tian—employ a narrator, while two treat the poetry as through-composed song.
Pierre Jalbert’s “The Invention of the Saxophone,” not surprisingly, is scored for saxophone and piano besides the narrator. It’s the longest single setting in the Suite, and at over 12 minutes, it outstays its welcome. The saxophone-and-piano noodling comes to seem repetitive and is simply no match in wit and intelligence for the poetry itself. To Jalbert’s credit, however, Collins’ references to jazz do not elicit the usual classical-composer-trying-to-do-jazz response. Instead, we have a kind of Cubist simulacrum of jazz, jazz fractured and put back together again at odd angles. If Jalbert had been more economical with his instrumental writing, his clever take on jazz would have made more of an impact.
Vivian Fung has the good sense to choose one of Collins’s funniest poems, “The Willies,” to end her three-poem set. She supplies an appropriately jittery accompaniment, and the fine narrator on this CD, Steve Robinson, does the rest. “Insomnia” features more apposite and entertaining tone painting from the instrumentalists (clarinet, cello, piano), while “The Man in the Moon” provides a somber and slightly spooky interlude.
Zhou Tian’s setting of a single Collins poem features flute, viola, and harp as well as narrator. It’s a group of instruments that can’t fail but suggest the Impressionists, and in fact reminds me of Ravel’s lovely Introduction and Allegro minus a couple of players. If Tian’s isn’t the most effective setting in the bunch, it’s certainly the prettiest.
However, for me, the most successful settings are those that treat the poetry as songs. The four poems that Stacy Garrop sets offer whimsical instructions for reading and writing verse and include two of Collins’s works that often show up in the classroom, “Introduction to Poetry” and “Sonnet,” which is a hoot even if you don’t know everything there is to know about sonnets. These are funny poems and witty musical treatments thereof, but Garrop manages to inject an edgy drama into the two final poems in her set, “Vade Mecum” and “Endangered.” Ars Poetica is the most varied and challenging of the five composers’ works.
More poignant and also more traditionalist are the settings by Lita Grier. “Forgetfulness” and “Dancing Toward Bethlehem” are poems about loss, and Grier creates two vest-pocket opera scenes to accommodate the verse. The melancholy “second voice” provided by the clarinet is just right for these settings.
I’ve already praised narrator Steve Robinson, whose voice is requisitely clear and authoritative but who wisely doesn’t try to make points—instead, lets Collins speak for himself. Jonathan Beyer’s baritone has a light-operatic ring to it, perfect for the Grier settings. While Buffy Baggott’s mezzo isn’t half as easy on the ear, she’s an expressive soloist whose voice is firm across its whole range, and Stacy Garrop manages to put her through her paces. The instrumentalists are uniformly excellent, and the whole enterprise is captured in clean, attractively intimate sound. As a Billy Collins enthusiast, I think this project mostly does the poet proud.
-Lee Passarella
