William McClelland - Where the Shadow Glides (Songs, Solo Piano and Choral Works)

William McCLELLAND (b.1950)

Where the Shadow Glides 

Songs, Solo Piano and Choral Works

Cædmon’s Hymn • Five for Piano • These Last Gifts

Krista River, Mezzo-soprano • Alex Guerrero, Tenor

Thomas Meglioranza, Baritone • Robert May, Margaret Dudley,

Thomas McCarger and Suzanne Schwing, Narrators

Donald Berman and Blair McMillen, Pianos • David Enlow, Organ

The New York Virtuoso Singers • Harold Rosenbaum

The catalogue of William McClelland (b1950), as viewed on his website wmcclelland.com, is relatively modest in numbers, divided largely between vocal works and instrumental pieces for jazz ensemble. Naxos’s new release focuses on 15 of McClelland’s songs (no jazz), ‘all individual songs (no cycles)’, as the composer rather pointedly comments in his booklet essay. Curiously, and presumably unofficially, groupings or pairings of songs on similar subjects occur throughout, whether the two autumn songs (tracks 2 and 3), the two settings of modern British poets, Betjeman and Larkin, in tracks 3 and 4, ‘Autumn 1964’ and ‘Going’, or the penultimate pairing of ‘Garden Abstract’ and ‘To One Who Revisited an Old Garden’, where the poems of Hart Crane and Catherine Kirsopp juxtapose light and dark.

McClelland’s choice of poet includes William Carlos Williams (‘Labrador’, ‘The Defective Record’), James Wright (‘Autumnal’, ‘Snowstorm in the Midwest’), Emerson’s second wife, Lidian (‘Poem Composed in Sleep’), and Hilda Doolittle (‘Sea Rose’, ‘Storm’). The 15th-century Master of Wakefield's 'Hail Lovely and Pure', the longest work here, and the piano suite Five that immediately follows it, divides the album in half. There is a difference in tone and texture between the two halves of the programme, with the first set of songs often edgier, with a severity that one finds at times in Britten. The songs in the later stages of the album are usually less angular, more rounded in melodic contour and expressive profile – a touch more sentimental to my ear, too.

The performances are all well informed and nicely executed. Donald Berman’s accompaniments for Krista River and Thomas Meglioranza are models of support. Blair McMillen’s rendition of the piano suite Five is nicely done, though it must be conceded that the central ‘Demon Cloud’ and the song ‘Storm’ reveal the limitations of McClelland’s expressive vision. Best of all are the three choral items, not least the final setting of Catullus, ‘These Last Gifts’.