Previn: Honey and Rue; Barber: Knoxville; Gershwin: Porgy And Bess / Battle, Previn, et al
Back at the beginning of the 1990s, with some help from Carnegie Hall, soprano Kathleen Battle commissioned André Previn and Toni Morrison to write a song cycle for her. The result was a set of six songs calledHoney and Rue, referring to "the bitter and the sweet" that comes with life and love and is part of the African American experience. One of the songs, the last to be composed, is unaccompanied. The remaining five are scored for chamber orchestra and showcase Previn's chameleon-like abilities as an arranger--here capturing echoes of such European masters as Mahler and Berg, there a hint of Americana in the Copland-Bernstein vein, and elsewhere the engaging verve of jazz and the blues. Previn conducts his score with breezy authority, drawing spirited playing from the Orchestra of Saint Luke's, particularly in the jazzy third song ("The Town Is Lit") and the spiritual-like concluding number ("Take My Mother Home"). Battle sings expressively and with obvious commitment--both here and in the selections by Barber and Gershwin that fill out the disc--though not without her lately characteristic affectations. The recording makes her voice sound oddly reverberant, as though it had been subjected to the kind of processed engineering usually reserved for pop productions.--Ted Libbey