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Unholy Sonnets

and other song cycles

Samuel Adler composer

Joseph Evans tenor
Rebecca Karpoff soprano
Freda Herseth soprano
Cary Lewis piano
Atlanta Winds

Release Date: November 10, 2023
Catalog #: NV6578
Format: Digital
21st Century
Chamber
Vocal Music
Piano
Voice
Wind Ensemble

Few forms in classical music are as underrated as the song cycle. It is easy to be betrayed by the seemingly-modest set-up – piano and solo voice – requiring well-calculated finesse from a composer to seize its minimalist power and bring it into full bloom. UNHOLY SONNETS, a collection of songs by German-born American Samuel Adler, succeeds greatly in this effort.

Although all works presented are in English and the tonal language is decidedly modern, there is much that harks back to the German art song tradition of the 19th century. Despite the title, these are largely quiet, pensive pieces, confidently resting in a tranquil serenity.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Unholy Sonnets: The good-morrow Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 2:54
02 Unholy Sonnets: The Broken Heart Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 2:41
03 Unholy Sonnets: Woman's Constancy Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 4:05
04 Unholy Sonnets: The Indifferent Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 1:53
05 Unholy Sonnets: The Triple Foole Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 3:57
06 Four Songs About Nature: The Wind Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 0:47
07 Four Songs About Nature: Chill of the Eve Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 3:28
08 Four Songs About Nature: The Piper Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 2:26
09 Four Songs About Nature: And It Was Stormy Weather Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:17
10 Three Songs About Time: But I Was Young and Foolish Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:06
11 Three Songs About Time: Old Age Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:45
12 Three Songs About Time: Time You Old Gypsy Man Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:45
13 Three Songs About Love: Go Lovely Rose Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:46
14 Three Songs About Love: A Ditto Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:33
15 Three Songs About Love: Song Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 0:44
16 Two Songs From The Portuguese: Simple Song Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 0:40
17 Two Songs From The Portuguese: Ballad Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:05
18 Two Traditional Japanese Songs: Komori Uta (Lullaby) Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:37
19 Two Traditional Japanese Songs: Akai Kutsu (Red Shoes) Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 1:43
20 Wish For A Young Wife: Wish For A Young Wife Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 1:06
21 Wish For A Young Wife: Her Words Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 1:34
22 Wish For A Young Wife: Her Wrath Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 0:32
23 Wish For A Young Wife: The Shy Man Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 4:39
24 Wish For A Young Wife: The Moment Samuel Adler Joseph Evans, tenor; Cary Lewis, piano 1:26
25 In Thine Own Image Samuel Adler Freda Herseth, soprano; Cary Lewis, piano 2:45
26 Songs With Winds: Prelude Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 1:46
27 Songs With Winds: O Now the Drenched Land Wakes Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 1:16
28 Songs With Winds: An Easy Decision Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 1:10
29 Songs With Winds: The World Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 1:44
30 Songs With Winds: Folksong Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 1:30
31 Songs With Winds: Rest, Heart of the Tired World Samuel Adler Rebecca Karpoff, soprano; Atlanta Winds 3:22

Session Producer & Engineer Roy Christensen
Mastering Henk Kooistra

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Kacie Brown

Artist Information

Samuel Adler

Composer

Samuel Adler was born March 4, 1928 in Mannheim, Germany and came to the United States in 1939. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2001, and then inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in October 2008. In 2018 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (first class), the highest civilian award given by the German government. He is the composer of over 400 published works, including five operas, six symphonies, 17 concerti, eight string quartets, five oratorios, and many other orchestral, band, chamber and choral works, and songs, which have been performed all over the world.

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Atlanta Winds

ensemble

Founded in 1991, Atlanta Winds have been hailed as “one of Atlanta’s finest young chamber ensembles.” Unfortunately this group no longer exists in the form it was constituted when the group performed on this recording. At that time it was made up of members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and consisted of the following personnel: Amy Porter, flute; Yvonne Powers, oboe; Ted Gurch, clarinet; Elizabeth Burkhardt, bassoon; Richard Deane, horn. While some are still members of the orchestra, most are now in other leading positions in their field, mostly teaching in major institutions of higher learning.

Notes

Some of the most famous poems in the English language are the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, who was born in 1572 and lived into the first part of the 17th century. Too many people think of him as a pious poet. He certainly had another side to his personal­ity, and these love sonnets prove this fact.

In 1985 the Palm Beach Council of the Arts, with a generous grant from Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Montgomery, Jr., commissioned a song cycle for Joseph Evans. I thought it would be exciting to set some of the wonderful love poetry of John Donne for this occa­sion. The Unholy Sonnets are the result of this project.

The words are very powerful and range from the witty and pithy to the most sardonic and ironic views of relationships. The music tries to capture the wide spread of emotions with which these poems deal, and this puts a great demand on both the singer and the accompanist. Having known Joseph Evans for many years, I was certain he could capture all the energy and the drama contained in these songs, and I have never been disap­pointed. It is my hope that the listener would read the poems before listening to the songs, and then follow along as the music progresses: in this way I feel the best comprehension can be achieved. Each song has its own little drama and can have tremendous contrasts in it, therefore there are, of course, similar swings of mood in the music of most of the songs to reflect the text. The set ends with a rather wistful and nostalgic song of resigna­tion called The Triple Foole, which in many ways summarizes many thoughts contained in the entire cycle.

— Samuel Adler

Composing songs and reading poetry from all creative periods has been a lifelong passion for me. Perhaps that is so because I was weaned on the great German Lieder repertory as both of my parents were singers. I remember my mother singing Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and even Reger lieder; while together, my parents sang the duets of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Later I fell in love with the songs of the French composers, especially Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc, as well as the English songs of Britten, Warlock, and others. When studying with Aaron Copland in 1949-1950, we often looked at his songs and those of his contemporaries, especially those of Israel Citkowitz, whom he valued highly as a vocal composer.

After my experience at Tanglewood in 1949 and 1950, and just before I was drafted in December of 1950, I wrote what I still consider my first real compositions, the Four Songs About Nature on texts by James Stephens. These were written in a “white heat” over a weekend, and even though they were not my first songs, I would call them my opus one. These songs are full of the influences of my teachers, especially Copland, and express the love of nature which I have always felt was a great source of ecstasy in my life. The weekend I refer to was the first weekend of September in 1950. The first poem, The Wind, was printed on the first page of the New York Times travel section and I rushed to the Worcester Public Library to pick up a collection of poems by James Stephens in order to find the other poems.

— Samuel Adler

The next two sets of songs, Three Songs About Love and Three Songs About Time, are products of the summer of 1943 which was spent at the MacDowell Colony. This wonderful place was a great source of inspiration for me, and I always was able to write very quickly. That summer was an especially productive one, and these sets of songs were two of four works written during July of 1954. The first set is based on poems of English authors while the second is mixed.

The first song of the second set is by Yeats while the other two are by more obscure authors. Judah Stampfer, author of the poem Old Age, passed away in 1997 and was a close personal friend with whom I wrote three one act operas. After a career as an orthodox rabbi, he became a writer, critic, and professor of English literature at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of two books of poetry, four books of fiction and several books of criticism, the most famous of which is the Histories of Shakespeare. Time You Old Gypsy Man is a poem which Ralph Hodgson wrote while he was living in the United States and I felt it was a fitting text with which to end this cycle.

— Samuel Adler

Two Songs from the Portuguese and In Thine Own Image were the product of the summer of 1955 at the MacDowell colony. The Portuguese songs are not based on folk melodies from that country: instead they are texts by Gil Vicente written to be composed by “whoever loved them.” They were translated into English by Longfellow and Burnham, and I tried to give them a folksong flavor.

That same summer I received a book written by an elderly poet living in Austin TX who had become a personal friend of mine. Fania Kruger, author of In Thine Own Image, was born in Russia and wrote very inspiring poetry in both English and Russian. This song is dedicated to Mack Harrell, the famous American baritone, who liked the song so much he often assigned it to his students.

— Samuel Adler

After a trip to Japan, my colleague of many years at the Eastman School, Masako Taribara, brought back some Japanese folk songs and gave them to me. Two of them she said were her favorites and that the arrangements she had found in Japan were not to her liking. She asked me if I would consider arranging these so that they could be put on recitals. I gladly acquiesced to this request since I have always loved to work with folk material. The Two Traditional Japanese Songs were a special challenge since I had never worked with songs in a language which I did not understand. Masako carefully pronounced the words for me, and we discussed each word separately before I set out to do the arrangements. These are simple childlike songs: I tried hard to keep this feeling in both settings, and hope I was able to catch the beauty of emotion in both tunes.

— Samuel Adler

Wish For A Young Wife is a cycle of five songs based on the poetry of American poet Theodore Roethke. Similar to the Unholy Sonnets on this recording, these poems are about the intimate relationships between two lovers. They address the subject of love and hate, envy and loneliness, as well as passion and ecstasy in a very concise way. While John Donne uses many words and metaphors, Roethke is sparse and direct. In my settings also I have tried to capture this difference. These songs were actually written almost 20 years before the Sonnets and the style of the music is much more sparse and terse. The vocalist and the pianist are true partners trying to portray these very pow­erful sentiments. The first, third, and fifth songs are fast and quite wild, while the second and fourth deal with the subject in a more romantic way. In the second song there is a feeling of a slow waltz, while in the fourth there is a slow, rather lazy and nostalgic atmosphere. The cycle is very short, and is best performed as a whole rather than as sepa­rate songs.

— Samuel Adler

Songs With Winds was commissioned by the New York Woodwind Quintet and premiered by them in 1968. The texts are by one of my favorite American poets, Kenneth Patchen. There is no one unifying topic, but rather a miscellany of wonderful images and thoughts, beautifully lyrical and ripe for musical settings. The Prelude establishes the moods of the cycle and introduces the melodic gestures and basic harmonies of the entire work. This harmonic language is quite different from the earlier songs on this recording since all except two movements of the piece are based on a tone row (my harmonic ideas were undergoing a change during the late 1960s). However, I feel that these sounds are very appropriate for the setting of the text.

— Samuel Adler

Texts