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'Against War' shows Stanley Grill's passion and compositional strength / blogcritics

blogcritics - Jon Sobel writes….“Coming of age in the ’60s, I absorbed in my core a belief that peace was possible,” writes composer Stanley Grill in the liner notes to Against War. His new suite of instrumental and vocal music is dedicated to the quest for peace. Though it seemed “that the millions of voices protesting in the streets, energized by rock and roll, could make a difference…it didn’t turn out that way,” he writes. But the music carries a different message: that hope lives on. In fact, the song suite that gives the album its title is dedicated “to the 11,000 or so poets who responded to the call and contributed their words and thoughts to Poets Against the War,” a literary response to the Iraq War.

Framing this central group of poem settings, all sung by soprano Lisa Rombach, are two longer compositions, the graceful and romantic instrumental “Declaration of Peace” and the gripping “Everything Passes.” The sequence flows together in smooth, smoky performances by Rombach and the Czech chamber orchestra the Komorni filharmoni Pardubice conducted by Marek Štilec.

The pastoral strains that introduce “Casualty” belie the message of its foreboding text by Virginia Adair. Minor-key orchestral jolts strafe the otherwise gentle music. Uneasy rockings between major and minor echo the anticipatory message of “Shore” by Helen Frost with its message of rising above and returning to safety.

But then cannon-like drums announce “none, a tanka,” a depiction by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk of a little girl at play, ignorant of the impending war. Brassy alarums follow in “stones and bones,” a verse by Lucille Clifton that seems to condemn a warlike U.S. Senate and ends with “our ears bleed/red and white and blue.”

Helping knit the pieces together is Rombach’s supple, sometimes luscious and sometimes reedy soprano that effectively conveys the strain of wartime even when, as in “WAR,” it’s nearly impossible – thankfully in this case – to make out the distressing lyrics. “The New Rapture” evokes the horrors of nuclear war, yet the music remains gentle and harmonic as Grill hews to the modes of late Romanticism. The last piece in the suite dies away peacefully with Zen poet Peter Levitt’s call to “Fill the air with poems/so thick/even bombs/can’t fall through.”

The theme of “Everything Passes,” itself something of a mini-suite, slides from war itself to the cycle of life and death in more natural settings, with text by Levitt, a haiku by 17th-century Japanese poet Basho, and William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” The piece presents fine examples of one of Grill’s biggest gifts, his facility with melody, which along with his mastery of orchestration is on display throughout this recording.

Like many composers, but more overtly than most, Stanley Grill responds to political and social events with his music. War has been a recurring theme, as in “Pavanne for a World Without War” from his earlier release “…and I paint stars with wings…” Against War shows his compositional strengths and the passion with which he deploys them remain as strong as ever. It’s available now on the major streaming platforms.

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