Jan DeGaetani Sings Berlioz, Mahler

The provenance of this release is remarkable. It was Ms. DeGaetani's final album, recorded while she was suffering from the final stages of leukemia but fortunately with sufficient temporary remission from the illness that it hardly affected her vocal prowess. (The album was recorded in sessions during May, 1989; she succumbed to the illness four months later.)

It is equally special that the works on this album were the outcome of a collaborative effort between Ms. DeGaetani and her husband, Phil West (of the Eastman School of Music), who arranged chamber orchestra settings of these three famous song cycles specifically for her. When one further includes the fact that Mr. West, an oboist of no mean accomplishment, performs the all-important oboe d'amore solo in Mahler's "Im Mitternacht" and English horn solo in his "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," the emotional outpouring is palpable.

In this year of the Berlioz bicentennial, it had been in my plans to review at least two other famous recordings of his "Les nuits d'été" (by Dame Janet Baker and Véronique Gens). But - again, given this recording's provenance - I thought it most fitting to begin with Ms. DeGaetani's version. The songs in the cycle suffer not a whit from the chamber orchestra arrangements. (In point of fact, Berlioz originally wrote these for mezzo and piano, and only later transcribed them for full orchestra.) With her idiomatic French and remarkably fresh voice considering the circumstances, Ms. DeGaetani's performance of these "songs of yearning" needs no apologies, least of all from the likes of me.

The five songs selected from Mahler's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," as the name of the cycle, and when in his life Mahler composed them, suggest, are "youthful" songs. Again, the freshness of Ms. DeGaetani's voice belies her physical condition at the time. Mr. West's arrangements, moreover, are totally idiomatic; as if Mahler himself had rescored the orchestral parts.

As good as these two song-cycles are, Mahler's five "Rückert-Lieder" occupy a very special place in this Mahlerite's heart. Chronologically, they occupy a period in Mahler's life when he was inadvertently at death's door (but nevertheless lived another decade), the result of which was a dramatic change in his compositional aesthetic, from the freshness and naivety of "early" Mahler to the inward-looking style of "late" Mahler (particularly his "Das Lied von der Erde" and the Ninth and unfinished Tenth Symphonies). In particular, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I have taken leave of the world") and the contemporaneous Adagietto of his Fifth Symphony foreshadow, more clearly than any other works of his, what the aesthetic of these "late" works was to be.

The Rückert cycle, already much more a "chamber" work in Mahler's hands than his earlier cycles, suffers not a whit from these scaled-down (basically, one instrument per part) settings of Mr. West. And, when - on the only occasion in the cycle as written by Mahler - the mezzo is called upon to bring forth a voice of some declamatory power (the final bars of "Im Mitternacht"), Ms. Degaetani rises to the occasion perfectly: at a "forte" level but not overriding the orchestra, just as Mahler had written it.

There was of course only one "perfect" way to end this valedictory album, with the final song of the Rückert cycle. One could write reams of material on the significance of "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" to an understanding of Mahler's style and sources of inspiration at different stages in his life (in fact, reams of material HAVE been written to that end). Far better, though, to simply listen to the marvelous interplay of Ms. DeGaetani's voice and Mr. West's English horn, and let oneself be reduced to jelly.

If you, like me, have an emotional connection with these songs and a fond recollection of Jan DeGaetani as one of America's finest singers, the tears will begin to flow very early into this album, and, by the last note of "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," you'll be little more than a puddle on the floor.

In retrospect, I guess we should be thankful that the middle song-cycle on this album turned out to be the "Wunderhorn" songs, and not Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" setting of other of Rückert's ineffably moving poetry. It might have been too much for merely mortal fans of Ms. DeGaetani's artistry to handle. This album is truly "one for the ages."