INTERVIEW: Composer Mark Abel heads into ‘The Cave of Wondrous Voice’
Photo: Mark Abel’s new album is called The Cave of Wondrous Voice. Image courtesy of Delos / Provided by Crossover Media with permission.
Mark Abel, the composer who has been making and recording music for several years, recently released a new album of chamber music called The Cave of Wondrous Voice, featuring four pieces — “Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva,” “Clarinet Trio,” “Intuition’s Dance” and “The Elastic Hours.” The recording effort serves as a quality example of Abel’s recent fascination and mastery of the chamber art form.
The recording has been in the works for quite some time — long before coronavirus hit earlier this year. Now, when the music world has been ordered to stay home and think of unique ways to share their art, he has moved ahead with the album’s release, with the hope that quarantined listeners are yearning for something unique to enjoy.
“As is often the case with composers, some of them are projects, kind of discreet projects, others of them are the best stuff that you produced recently, and you want to get it out there,” Abel said in a recent phone interview about the genesis of the project. “But I think the main thrust behind this release is the fact that it’s the first chamber music that has come out under my name. I’ve done five albums for Delos, and all of the previous stuff has been vocal music, ranging from opera to orchestral song cycles to solo songs to various other permutations. Vocal music is something that I have a kind of built-in affinity for, and [I] was once a rock musician many, many years. But chamber music has always been a tough nut for me to crack, and some kind of inner-blocks that I’ve had about it finally dissolved, magically. I can’t even explain why, [but] about three years ago I started writing chamber pieces and felt that I had three viable ones and found some terrific people who wanted to record them. That was the main thrust of this album.”
Those terrific people who helped him along the way are players David Shifrin, Fred Sherry and Carol Rosenberger. He is also was aided by violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker, pianist Dominic Cheli and hornist Sarah Beck.
“The earliest of these three chamber pieces that are on this record is a clarinet trio, and that’s a combination of instruments — as I mentioned in the notes I wrote for this album — that hasn’t been exploited as much as you would expect considering what a wonderful combination of instruments it is,” he said. “The piece that means the most to everybody pretty much in that sphere is the Brahms clarinet trio, which I’ve known since I was a kid, and I definitely felt it was a challenge to write something using the tools that he had at his disposal instrumentally wise.”
The challenge was overcome when something “clicked” in Abel’s brain. He doesn’t know what was preventing him from composing effective chamber music before, but he jumped over any hurdles and began to work in earnest on The Cave of Wondrous Voice.
“I was able to turn out what I think is a credible piece,” Abel said. “That boosted my spirits to the point where I have written some other stuff since then, a violin piece called ‘The Elastic Hours,’ which is also on this record, and a duo that David Shifrin and Carol Rosenberger play called ‘Intuition’s Voice.'”
This fascination with chamber music has not stopped since the album’s release. He is currently working on a cello sonata that he hopes to record in the future. Abel admitted that this musical awakening has opened up new vistas for him as a composer.
“Of course, I’ve listened to it since I was a kid, so it’s not unfamiliar,” he said. “It’s just something that I couldn’t get a handle on for a long time.”
Abel has been working with Delos since 2012, and that’s when he first made the connection with Rosenberger. They have gotten to know each other and become good friends over the years.
“She, of course, had a very long and successful recording career herself, and in fact she played on two pieces on my previous album,” Abel said. “She hadn’t recorded for about 15 years at that point, but she liked my music a lot. I have a longstanding relationship with her. David Shifrin I have known as a recording artist for a long time, and I’ve seen him play live a few times. I finally got a chance to meet him a couple of years ago, and he seems to like my music as well. When I showed him the clarinet trio, he said he wanted to perform it at his chamber music festival in Portland, Oregon, Chamber Music Northwest, which is a heaven-sent development for me. So he, Fred Sherry and another pianist premiered it in 2018, and we recorded it last fall.”
Composing and playing chamber music, with its relatively small number of instruments, has presented Abel with a welcome challenge, which at this point in his career he is more than ready to oblige. He has already found success with his collaborations with Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann, and he has set poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda and California poets Kate Gale and Joanne Regenhardt, according to his official biography. His résumé also boasts many years as a journalist and a few as a rock musician.
Chamber music was different for Abel, and that excited him.
“I’ve been writing vocal music for so long that I have a fair amount of fluidity with it,” he said. “It’s something that has been the repository I think of the most interesting musical ideas that I’ve had up to this point, but there was something … [with] chamber music. Its organic flow is what makes it successful chamber music. It was very frustrating for me because I feel that I achieved the organic flow aspect in my vocal music, but something in my head was not letting me let go and write with the kind of freedom that I don’t have any trouble accessing when I’m writing vocal music. I don’t think I can really explain it, except that my early unsuccessful attempts to write chamber music were stiff-sounding and too calculated, and they didn’t have at least the illusion of spontaneity that you have to write into the music.”
Now that stiffness and calculation are long gone, and Abel has entered the cave of wondrous voice.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Mark Abel’s new album, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, is now available from Delos. Click here for more information.
Revised: Number of selections on album.
