While listening to soprano Laura Strickling’s latest album Confessions, I was reminded of a phrase she has said countless times in rehearsals, interviews, and performances: “Song matters.” 

Her new CD, available now from Yarlung Records, embodies this credo, that the combination of words and music is not a nicety or luxury, but rather an urgent human necessity.  Both the music itself as well as Laura’s performances have an urgency that’s palpable.  It’s at the same time a deeply personal and yet fully universal statement. 

The album consists of six works (and five premiere recordings) of American song composers with whom Laura has a personal relationship: Clarice Assad, Gilda Lyons, Tom Cipullo, Amy Beth Kirsten, Michael Djupstrom, and Libby Larsen.  What’s most striking is the variety of sound worlds created by nothing more than voice, piano, and text.

The album opens with Clarice Assad’s Confessions, a sly work that takes full advantage of Assad’s background in Musical Theatre, Jazz, and South American musical styles. The set of three songs transcends being an exercise in “crossover appeal” by its impeccable craft and dark subtext, dealing with the insecurities, frustrations, and inner demons that face women in the modern world.  

Gilda Lyon’s haunting Songs of Lament and Praise take their texts from anonymous Irish texts from the 8th-10th century AD.  The piece feels in many ways like a spiritual companion to Samuel Barber’s iconic Hermit Songs, which also uses adapted medieval texts.  However, whereas Barber’s work is more or less in a mid-20th century neo-romantic idiom, Lyons recreates the sound world of early music with melismatic vocal-writing and modal style that harkens all the way back to Gregorian Chant.  One can imagine Hildegard von BIngen writing these songs if she were from our times.  However, these songs are not just a mere homage to an antiquated style, Lyons makes these thousand-year-old voices come to life with humanity in grace, notably in the penultimate song A Mother’s Lament, which Laura sings with an uncanny tenderness. 

Tom Cipullo’s contribution to the album, How to Get Heat Without Fire, is a perfect example of why the composer is among the very highest echelon of living American song composers. Tom’s music always sits in the outermost range of emotions, a fact that makes it always alive and deeply satisfying.  Cipullo’s sense of humor can be a step-too-far-in-the-best-possible-way like in The Pocketbook but also have the dramatic heft of a Puccini aria, as does the final song in the cycle that gives the work its title.   

Amy Beth Kirsten’s To See What I See has a certain steeliness that’s reminiscent of the atonal works of Aaron Copland or Ruth Crawford Seeger.  The text is of words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet- the work brilliantly captures the rage and indignation of the wronged victim of the Danish Prince’s spite.   

Each of Michael Djupstrom’s three masterful Teasdale Songs mine a central image for musical inspiration.  The opening I Would Live in Your Love depicts the “sea-grasses in the sea” with luxurious arpeggiated harmonies in the piano. In Absence the “insects and their passions” dominate the piano texture, with quiet whirring gestures.  Finally, Spring Rain is brought to life with a trill-like ostinato that permeates the song.  Pianist Joy Schreier brings the deftest of touches to these various colors in the accompaniment part.  But this superficial tone-painting is only the pre-text for Djupstrom’s emotionally resonant reading of poet Sarah Teasdale’s mediations on love and loss.   

The album ends with Libby Larsen’s Righty, 1966, a charming song that includes an obbligato flute part (performed ably by Sarah Ekman McIver).  It’s a clever song that combines youthful energy, wit, and transcendence in a way that only Larsen can.

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Listen to Confessions.

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