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Lita Grier Vocal Music

Songs from Spoon River,
Reflections of a Peacemaker etc


Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Elizabeth Norman, soprano; Scott Ramsay, tenor; Robert Sims, baritone; Alexander Tall, baritone; Levi Hernandez, baritone; Welz Kauffman, piano; William Billingham, piano; John Goodwin, piano; Chicago Children's Choir; Anne Bach, oboe; Tina Laughlin, percussion


FIVE SONGS FOR CHILDREN (1962 & 1999)
Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Welz Kauffman, piano
Sneezles
Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Anne Bach, oboe; Tina Laughlin, percussion; William Billingham, piano

FIVE SONGS FROM A SHROPSHIRE LAD
Robert Sims, baritone; William Billingham, piano

TWO SONGS FROM EMILY DICKINSON
Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Welz Kauffman, piano

SONGS FROM SPOON RIVER
Elizabeth Norman, soprano; Michelle Areyzaga, soprano; Scott Ramsay, tenor; Alexander Tall, baritone; Levi Hernandez, baritone; Welz Kauffman, piano; William Billingham, piano
REFLECTIONS OF A PEACEMAKER
Chicago Children's Choir / Josephine Lee, conductor; John Goodwin, piano

A significant collection from Lita Grier [pictured; d.o.b. not divulged] a woman composer who enjoyed early success, but gave up when serialism etc became the fashion. After a rewarding career in administration etc, she returned to composing after eclecticism had regained favour. The Songs for Children illustrate her stylistic continuity across that long break.

Grier's songs here are all unashamedly tonal, but fashioned with great skill and are unfailingly apt for her well chosen texts [q.v. Beth Anderson's "beautiful music"].

Outstanding are two Dickinson settings (which would go well alongside Copland's), and those for the moving Edgar Lee Masters accounts from the grave of lives well lived.

Michelle Areyzaga adds lustre to every item she is in. A fine children's choir does full justice to some remarkable life-enhancing poems by Mattie Stepanek, a gifted child who died of Dysautonomic Mitcochondrial Myopathy at a mere 14 years of age.

But having regard to the ravages caused by measles, and the regrettable controversies about preventetive immunisation, perhaps it would have been better to have omitted the 1972 song Sneezles; no longer a joking subject.

It's all lovingly put together, with full texts.

Recommended. Inspiring !

Peter Grahame Woolf

P.S. One of our vocal/opera specialist reviewers has rejected this Songs from Spoon River disc completely as "banal music badly sung", presumably including Michelle Areyzaga in those strictures! A reminder that, at the end, all reviewing has a large subjective component. Chacun à son goût ! [Editor]