MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Poems, Songs of ‘Sing, Ariel’ Come to U.S.

Composer Alexander Goehr wasn’t sure what his librettist had in mind when he handed him the text for “Sing, Ariel,” which receives its U.S. premiere Friday at Chapman University in Orange.

“I don’t know what it’s about,” Goehr laughed in a recent phone interview from his home in Swaffham Prior, England. “When I asked (librettist Frank Kermode), he wouldn’t tell me.

“Should I attempt to interpret it, though, I would say it’s about aging or the role of music in poetry . . . I suppose it’s (also) the poet growing old, the poet being Frank Kermode.”

Composed in 1989 for the Aldeburgh Festival in England, “Sing Ariel,” which will be played Friday by the Southwest Chamber Music Society, is a song cycle that Goehr likens to Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.” The texts were compiled from “all sorts of sources” by Kermode, best known as a literary critic and scholar. He is friend and a colleague of the composer.

Said Goehr: “It’s like one poem, which has been composed out of other poetry . . . either as complete poems or sometimes only single lines.” The authors include Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Auden, Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin, among others.

“When I first went to Frank--I suppose I could have picked some poems by myself--I told him I didn’t want a list of his favorite poems, but something a bit more--a kind of song cycle or monodrama of some sort, and he obliged with this. It’s special for him, he’s written nothing like it before.”

The title, taken from the opening of Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” the first work in the piece, refers to the elusive spirit in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

“Ariel is a character who doesn’t care--that’s one way of looking at him,” Goehr said. “He’s free of gravity, and he’s not totally bound by the vicissitudes of human life and love. Men do things, women do things, and Ariel is a free spirit.”

The work falls into five parts, progressing from a “sort of Paradise in which everything is lovely . . . (through) solitude, separation, unhappiness and loneliness. . . .

“And so it carries on and gets more violent and reaches a climax in the fourth section, which is a setting of a single poem by Larkin, which he calls ‘Unfinished Poem.’ ”

He called it “an astonishing poem about a poet lying in a garret waiting for death to come. It isn’t death who comes but a long-haired girl with barefoot feet. But he doesn’t know if she is simply a long-haired girl . . . or death as a long-haired girl.”

Some were of poems were very difficult to set, the 60-year-old composer said. “Never--had I not had my arm twisted by Frank--would I have set Wallace Stevens’ poems,” the composer said. “But once I had seen a bit of light, I found them extremely beautiful and evocative.”

The poems, which are only used in part, are “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” “Of Mere Being” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

But he found Larkin’s poem the supreme challenge.

“Of all the poets who figure here, Larkin is the most deceptive. He looks like he’s either extremely casual and he hasn’t done (the poem) properly or is simple-minded . . . until you look at it carefully. When you try to set it, live with it, you see the intense complexity of the rhythmic variation. Never mind setting it, it’s jolly hard to say. “

Goehr believes that if a composer sets words to music, the words should be heard distinctly. “But I wouldn’t want to make a rule about that,” he said. “One just hopes it’s appropriate. . . . A great deal of the way poetry is set to music makes intelligent poetry sound stupid.”

The important thing, he said, is to get the speed right. “A lot of it is too slow, as customarily set. When I’m teaching a student, I try to tell them to get a move on.”

Goehr finds the complex rhythms of English verse actually “inspire one to richer (musical) settings,” he said. “I’ve set German and I’ve set English and have set Latin, and of all the languages I’ve considered . . . English is the most agreeable to set, precisely because of the complex rhythms and the sub-rhythms and the subtlety of innuendo and stress.

“On the other hand, of course, the syllables that you set in English tend to be harder and shorter than in Italian, and that accounts to some extent for the particularly English type of singer. In this case, however, the particular type of singer isn’t English. She is American.”

The soprano is Lucy Shelton, who sang at the premiere in Aldeburgh. She will be accompanied on Friday by conductor Oliver Knussen and members of the Southwest Chamber Music Society. Two additional sopranos, in this case Anne Marie Ketchum and Kerry Walsh, form “a kind of backup group and sometimes come forward to contradict the principal singer,” Goehr said. They are all accompanied by a “slightly jazz-inspired” ensemble that includes violin, viola, string bass, trumpet, saxophone and piano.

“The choice of the instruments gradually evolved,” Goehr said. “It went through many metamorphoses until it found its final form.”

* Oliver Knussen will conduct soprano Lucy Shelton and members of the Southwest Chamber Music Society in the U.S. premiere of Alexander Goehr’s “Sing, Ariel” on Friday at 8 p.m. in the Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell, Orange. The program also includes Purcell’s “Musick for a While.” $7 to $14. (800) 726-7147.

‘NUTCRACKER’ CASTING: The Kirov Ballet of Leningrad has announced principal casting for the “Nutcracker” ballet, Dec. 1-6 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Dancing Masha/the Princess and the Prince will be Zhanna Ayupova and Igor Zelensky on Dec. 1 and 4 at 8 p.m. Taking over these roles, respectively, will be Irina Chistiakova and Alexander Gulyayev (Dec. 2 and 5 at 8 p.m.); Larissa Lezhnina and Victor Baranov (Dec. 3 at 8 p.m.); Veronika Ivanova and Baranov (Dec. 5 at 2 p.m.), and Lezhnina and Zelensky (Dec. 6 at 2 p.m.). Information: (714) 556-2787.