American Record Guide 

March/April 2021, pages 181-182

Confessions

Laura Strickling, soprano; Joy Schreier, piano

Composers: Assad, Lyons, Cipullo, Kirsten, Djupstrom, Larsen

Randy Bellous: Executive Producer

Yarlung catalog number 18798     61 minutes

Laura Strickling dedicated this album to the memory of her aunt, Janet Strickling, who was a powerful supporter of the album but died from Covid-19 before she could hear the finished product. This album feels like an homage to femininity: the lovely, the messy, the American Record Guide 181 graceful, the rough-around-all-the-edges, and the sisterhood we share with others, with people who encountered it before us and have helped us navigate our own womanhood— and the legacy that we write in the colorful story of our actions and dramas and innermost contemplations. This is a collection of poignant works, pieces whose words and notes exhibit storytelling at its finest. If you see yourself in the texts, you’ll yourself feel seen and understood; if you don’t, you’ll still be wildly entertained.

Clarice Assad’s Confessions comes across almost like Sex and the City’s artsong cousin. Grooving, luxurious, and sensual, the music supports Naomi Major’s text, whose lines ooze both indulgence and an anxious consciousness of it.

Songs of Lament and Praise by Gilda Lyons brings together several texts from the 10th-12th centuries and sets them with her fluid, florid, melodic aesthetic. Lyons calls for the soprano to be gymnastic and graceful, and to hold the space of the performance with a deep sense of reverence. Strickling fulfills and FILLS this role, her voice as a siren-chameleon, changing shape and color and nature with total control as contexts switch and emotions bend ever so slightly from word to word. The fourth movement struck me with exceptional strength: the poem, titled “A Mother’s Lament”, begins “My hands shake, My poor body totters, My breasts are sapless, My eyes are wet.”

How To Get Heat Without Fire, composed by Tom Cipullo with a poem by Marilyn Kallet, is a tour de force of sound and story.

Amy Beth Kirsten’s To See What I See is cleverly constructed and exudes gravitas: with this snippet of text from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, we hear Ophelia’s lament and feel uncomfortable pangs of empathy. Kirsten’s setting adds depth to this text: a daunting task well executed.

Michael Djupstrom’s Teasdale Songs, with texts by Sara Teasdale, paints tender moments with explosive feeling. His use of the upper register of the piano—Joy Schreier’s artistry in full display especially in the subtle, understated moments—lends a magical patina to these pieces.

Libby Larsen’s Righty 1966 is a forceful bildungsroman in miniature, Michele Antonello Frisch’s text transporting the listener through moments of a childhood played out inside fantastical dreams and outside on the baseball field.

Sarah Eckman McIver’s flute flutters gracefully, tenderly alongside our protagonist.

With this album, Strickling has paid homage to the feminine, gathering her audience in a warm and brilliant embrace of sisterhood, and she has left a weighty chapter of her own legacy here.

–Stephanie Boyd

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