REVIEWS:
Carole Farley, whose range is as impressive in stylistic as in purely vocal terms, shows herself here to be an ideal interpreter for Rorem, and his playing responds with hand-in-glove precision and sympathy. The voice itself, at once tensile-strong and appealingly vulnerable, seems in splendid condition.
-- Bernard Jacobson, Fanfare
The CD's first nine tracks, settings of Theodore Roethke, fairly represent the Rorem approach - conservative, elegantly crafted, subtle and flexible in expressive range. Song No. 1, "The Waking," shows his fondness, akin to that of Satie and Poulenc, for setting each syllable to a single note value, but by the second track, 'Root Cellar,' he has yielded to the occasional temptation to assign two notes to one syllable. 'Orchids' shows a pictorial gift, with music as limp as the plants described. There's Ivesian humor in 'The Serpent,' even a twisty melisma in 'Snake.'
The sequence of what follows, chosen for variety, should have something for everyone, and everything for some. Most of the songs are short, never gilding the lily. Gertrude Stein's 'I am Rose' gets just a few bars. But with a longer piece, such as Elizabeth Bishop's 'Visit to St. Elizabeth's,' the composer performs the feat of stretching out a fast tempo. Rorem finds rare magic in the monotone second verse of Tennyson's 'Ask me no more,' and broad, big-boned music in 'Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night,' first of a closing group of five devoted to Walt Whitman. Especially in the first three of these, Rorem's own poetry rises to meet Whitman's, and the cause of the American art song has been ratcheted up a peg."
-- John W Freeman, Opera News
