The composer Alex Weiser follows up his Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut album and all the days were purple – which set poetry to music from the lider of Anna Margolin and her fellow Yiddish poets Edward Hirsch, Rachel Korn and Abraham Sutzkever to William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson who spoke on the transience of love and life, featuring the experimental musician and Roomful of Teeth member Eliza Bagg on vocals – with two song cycles which serve as a love letter to New York City, a teeming metropolis, an emblem of the immigrant experience and the place which the composer calls home. Passionately rendered, exploring the cosmopolitan thrum and bustling hubbub of the city as it glows beneath indigo moonlit skies, Weiser shines his lamp over two corners of New York City’s history, with the mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen accompanied by a seven-piece chamber ensemble, which includes Lee Dionne on piano, Yasmina Spiegelberg on clarinet, Brigid Coleridge and Lun Li on violins, Jordan Bak on viola, Julia Yang on the cello and Sam Suggs on double bass.
The first cycle in a dark blue night features five settings of Yiddish poetry which was written by newly arrived immigrants to New York City around the turn of the century, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A dark lustrous reverie which moves with the sweep of a skirt over the sidewalk, buffeted by the bright lights of Broadway and gazing rapt at a cavalcade of stars, the cascading key rolls of Dionne’s piano on ‘Night Reflex’ close with a vibratory warmth and a held note by the mezzo-soprano, which segues into a sashay over the Riegelmann Boardwalk as the Cyclone, Wonder Wheel and radiating whorl of the Parachute Jump hover against the backdrop of a sunlit sky.
Coney Island Days delights in the adventures of Weiser’s late grandmother, who grew up in Brooklyn during the thirties and forties, living with her family in a single room behind their knish store while spending her summers buoyed by the entertainments of Coney Island. Capturing with a gilded fondness her carefree youth, Weiser says that ‘Hers was a multilingual world where she was taught English at school, but where her Yiddish-speaking parents could barely understand the language of their new land’.
A plangent, plunging bass line and the traipsing and frolicking of Spiegelberg’s clarinet introduce the titular ‘Coney Island’, which in rhapsodic terms describes a day at the beach without adults or limits, whose highlights include such quintessential fare as a hot dog at Nathan’s and a frozen custard, which in the recollection of Weiser’s grandmother was habitually dropped on the boardwalk by her friend. The plainspoken and digressional quality of his grandmother’s reminiscences make for pliant and whimsical vocal lines against the swirl of the ensemble, which in Dionne, Coleridge and Yang comprises the three founding members of the critically acclaimed Merz Trio. More they imbue Coney Island Days with a beautiful ache, the sublimation of nostalgia which doesn’t merely trade in wistful memories of a burnished past but sketches out and daubs with watercolour old and sometimes long-forgotten places and summons as if traced by a caressing finger the faces of old friends, infusing them with all of the vim and vigour of the present. That allows moments of unvarnished sentiment to really place you in their choke, as when Weiser’s grandmother caps her day at the beach, splashes of water, the inattentive Morty and Nathan’s hot dogs and custards with change from fifteen cents with the lines ‘I had good times. All my family was loving to me’ as the ensemble glides to a halt.
After elaborating the dynamics of the family knish store and a commercial pot which becomes both a receptacle of petty regrets and a container pennyfull of childish hopes and stubborn dreams, ‘Russian Bath’ through its winnowing clarinet takes us back in the direction of Coney Island this time with a more elegiac feel. The water of those baths might wet our toes and moisten the hairs on our forearms, which in turn bear the sweet cherubic plumpness of ‘Mother’ as Weiser’s grandmother describes a woman who squeezed herself into bespoke corsets and died of leukemia while still attending school in a bid to speak better English, and without ever celebrating her birthday or knowing her own true age.
The final two songs of the cycle are devoted to ‘Aunt Fanny’, who spurned Coney Island for the mountains, to whom the author in a sort of coda to Coney Island Days offers a tender word of lament. Having paid to add the names of her parents to The American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island – the price today for a single-line inscription starts at $300 – Weiser’s grandmother regrets not having done the same for Fanny. Through her words, Weiser’s daring yet sensitive compositions and the breadth and swell of the ensemble, Coney Island Days more than makes good on the debt.
