Description
Whether this is your first orbit or you already count yourself amongst the members of the How Sad, How Lovely devout--Connie Converse's modest and also astonishing kitchen table recordings--the sounds currently spinning through your synapses here offer an entirely unique perspective on an artist whose output spanned both folk music and classical music. Her art songs, the "Piano Songs," never made it on tape during her own and Gene Deitch's kitchen recording sessions. They were written later, and composed for voices other than her own, sometimes soprano, sometimes baritone. Her Only Light is a more dimensional, more expansive view of Connie Converse, a composer-performer-pacifist-scholar-activist who, like the story of her enigmatic departure, deserves a telling beyond an easy headline. Converse's art songs and folk songs appear together here, transcribed by Ronnie Kuller from the original hand-written piano scores, and arranged for an ensemble of violin, viola, cello, harp, and clarinets. Vocalist Emmy Bean writes: ...the craft that Connie put into her art songs--the 'Cassandra Cycle,' 'anyone lived in a pretty how town,' etc--is also there in the songs she wrote on guitar. They are no less solid, no less fully realized than the ones she wrote on piano. The reward of singing them is to be inside of Connie's mind for a moment, to feel such great joy and such deep empathy, and to be able to smile at things that are so, so sad. Ronnie Kuller's orchestrational witticisms and delights, like her leitmotif approach to "Talkin Like You (Two Tall Mountains)," are gracious without unnecessary reverence or over-caution. Be carried off by Emmy Bean's sumptuous and entrancing delivery of "Father Neptune," but don't miss the cheeky wink in her voice as she alights on the song's more eyebrow-raising lines ("And it's still his creed that he has no need of a wife...except on shore"). This heroine of songwriting contained multitudes--and with Her Only Light, we are finally provided Connie Converse in full, resplendent resolution. --Doyle Armbrust
