3 Cabaret Songs (1977-85)

William Bolcom (b 1938)

3 Cabaret Songs (1977-85)

Fur (Murray the Furrier)

Oh Close The Curtain

Amor

William Bolcom has long made a speciality of the popular idiom both as a composer and as performer – not least, in the latter case, in partnership with his singer wife Joan Morris. What is more, while he is prolific in all the usual orchestral and chamber areas of the repertoire, he has always been most successful with compositions like the four volumes of Cabaret Songs, which he produced over a period of years in collaboration with his regular librettist Arnold Weinstein. Clearly, of his two distinguished composition teachers, Darius Milhaud at Mills College and Olivier Messiaen in Paris, the former was the more influential.

Brilliantly done, the Cabaret Songs deserve their success. They are the work of a composer who has an obviously thorough knowledge of the history of popular song, who commands a highly developed technique but who uses his academic resources with the utmost discretion in illuminating the style, wit and occasionally the pathos of the lyrics. Fur (Murray the Furrier) so effectively offsets exuberance with poignancy that the last line can scarcely retrieve the carefree situation. There is no better illustration than Oh close the curtain of Weinstein’s observation that “we wrote these songs as a cabaret in themselves, no production ‘values’ to worry about. The scene is the piano, the cast is the singer.” In this answer to Cole Porter’s What a swell party this is! Bolcom introduces the singer with a delicate parody of Webern, which she gradually converts to blues and, briefly before the end, back again. As the charmingly debonair narrative of Amor confirms, the Weinstein-Bolcom partnership is as congenial as any of its kind.