Search - et al Carl Bohm (Composer) :: Songs We Forgot to Remember

Sung Like This, They Should Stay Remembered

Curtis Crawford | Charlottesville, VA United States | 09/30/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Commenting last June on CDs featuring the tenor, Kenny Baker, I wrote that his might be the most beautiful recorded tenor voice of the 20th century. My comparison included a lot of fine tenors, but I hadn't heard John Aler. Recently, I have been listening to him as Jupiter in Handel's SEMELE, then as Nadir in Bizet's PEARL FISHERS, and more recently as the soloist for this album. Kenny Baker's voice is pure, limpid, naturally musical throughout his range. The lower part of Aler's range has less music, but the upper part is richer than Baker's, and the whole is tremendously exciting.



Nowhere is his voice lovelier than in the first song on this CD, "I Hear You Calling Me." Composed circa 1903, overflowing with love and longing, it became the immensely popular signature-piece in the 1920s and '30s of the Irish tenor, John McCormack. (Who, with less primitive technology, might well have provided the most beautiful recorded tenor voice of the century.)



I found some of the Aler collection quite familiar, others new and highly attractive (where have they been all my life?), and others that are lifted above the ordinary more by the singer's voice and art than by intrinsic merit. The songs are predominantly art or concert songs, composed mostly in the late 19th or early 20th century. Elegant, highly romantic, often ambitious, sometimes sentimental, popular in their time with lovers of semi-classical music, and often performed in concerts by leading singers of the day. Their lyrics include the poetry of Joyce Kilmer, Robert Herrick, Rabindranath Tagore, Shelley, Poe, Yeats, Eugene Field, and Sydney Lanier.



Did Aler get the idea for this CD from the fine baritone Thomas Hampson's CD, "An Old Song Resung"? Hampson's CD (unfortunately out of print), came out in 1990; Aler's, in 1995. The songs in both collections might well have been sung to similar audiences at similar concerts by similar singers. Still, the two CDs have only two works in common: - "Do Not Go, My Love," composed by Richard Hageman in 1917, and "When I Have Sung My Songs," by Ernest Charles in 1934. Both songs are superb, and both singers do them beautifully. I would give Aler a slight edge on the first; Hampson, on the second.



[UPDATE, 2/17/09. I'm sorry to add that Aler's singing in this recording doesn't wear well for me. Kenny Baker, though originally recorded in the 1930s-40s, continues to sounds clear, lovely, limpid as a mountain stream, while Aler, by comparison often seems harsh.]"