Susan Chilcott "BBC Voices: Volume 3. The Gift to be Free".(Recordings)(Sound Recording Review)

[] Songs by Copland. Burnside, piano. English texts. BBC Black Box BBM1074 (Koch, dist.)

Aaron Copland's music is about as American as John Wayne, baseball and roaming buffalos, so at first glance a CD of his songs featuring British soprano Susan Chilcott and Scottish pianist Iain Burnside might elicit surprise. Yet these artists make no apologies for foreign passports; Burnside's excellent liner notes point out that the cowboy composer himself was in fact a Brooklyn-born Lithuanian Jew whose first set of Old American Songs was given its premiere by the distinctly non-American Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten.

Fine American singers such as Dawn Upshaw, Jan DeGaetani, Paul Sperry and Thomas Hampson have recorded Copland's songs, but Chilcott's performances in this recital are more straightforward and genuine. When Chilcott sings "The Boatmen's Dance" or "Long time ago," I hear the raw power of the songs. She is able to cut right to the heart of a piece and, stripped of artifice, such songs as "Simple Gifts" or even "I bought me a cat" ring true.

Some of the early works reflect Copland's student pursuits in Paris. The 1918 song "Night," on a poem by Aaron Schaffer, is a gauzy, whole-tone-infused French counterfeit, albeit lovely, while the 1927 "Poet's Song," a setting of e.e. cummings, exposes the young composer's dabbling in twelve-tone composition. In "Night," Burnside, a formidable pianist, fashions the perfect pillow for Chilcott's big, enveloping sound. And the listener can revel in the visceral enjoyment of the soprano's utterly natural diction; she cares greatly for the language and lingers tantalizingly over certain consonants--for example the long, languid l in the line, "My heart is placid as the lake"--delighting in the feel of words in her mouth, even as she is reaching out to the listener with their meaning.

Chilcott also displays an uncanny connection to the texts of Copland's 1950 song cycle, 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson. Themes of death and transformation permeate these poems, shot through with Dickinson's sharp voice. Burnside's playing is as vulnerable, brave and direct as Chilcott's singing; they make beautiful connections of tempo and emotion between the songs, as they tread the cycle's path. The pianist begins with a silken touch, and the soprano caresses the phrases of "Nature, the gentlest mother," as if she herself were the gentlest of mothers, introducing subtle and growing excitement ("restraining rampant squirrel or ...