Lori Laitman’s The Ocean of Eternity
In 1939 a thirteen-year-old Jewish-German girl, Anneliese Katz, was sent by her parents from her native Cologne to England to save her from the risen horror of Nazism in Germany. She had witnessed the ascent of that beast; she had survived the Kristallnacht; she had seen the burning of Cologne’s beautiful Glockengasse Synagogue on that same awful night (9-10 November 1938). When England finally declared war on Germany (3 September 1939) she became an Enemy Alien there. She learned English, trained and graduated as a nurse, met and married a medical student (D. A. Ranasinghe), and with him moved in 1949 to Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), where she became a citizen in 1956 and earned a diploma in journalism from Colombo College. In 1971 she published the first of twelve books of poetry and short stories written in her adopted tongue, English – volumes that won international praise. She worked with Amnesty International, raised her children, and wrote: words of harrowing wisdom and beauty. She died in 2016.
And when that thirteen-year-old Jewish-German girl bade farewell to her parents in March, 1939, she consigned them – the people whose past she inherited, and who gifted her her present and future – to her past. As she would later learn, they and all her kin in Germany were killed in the Holocaust, figures in a past that she would ever carry with her, whose image would ever live in her.
It was these experiences that enabled Anneliese Katz, known today as Anne Ranasinghe, to become internationally renowned as a poetic “voice for peace that emerged from the ruins of war” (Isuri Kaviratne), and that endowed her with her provocative and profoundly beautiful views on what Sri Lankan international-relations analyst Uditha Devapriya has termed “the thin, fragile line between the past and present, between forgetting and remembering.”
It is the main theme of which composer Lori Laitman’s exquisitely beautiful song cycle The Ocean of Eternity (scored for soprano, soprano saxophone, and piano) was born. And that work itself is the centerpiece of her newest masterpiece of an album bearing the same title. I doubt I’ve ever been so captivated by a textual and musical contemplation of the vastly recursive cycles of time and tide as I was (and am) by The Ocean of Eternity itself. The most obvious of the other songs of this album that engage on that theme is “When You Are Old” (text by William Butler Yeats; here given its world-premiere recording with Laitman herself playing the tender and richly expressive piano) – but that is only one of many.
For those reasons, which are historical, literary, and philosophical, as well as for musical ones, I consider The Ocean of Eternity the most important classical vocal album of 2022. It’s an album that’s sumptuously beautiful, and witty; that’s profoundly engaged with social themes both historical and timely; that’s philosophically inclined, and that’s possessed of real and pervasive intellectual and poetic elegance. I do not remember the last time I encountered an album that possessed all those attributes.
Nor do I recall ever being more entranced by the very first sounds I heard on a song album (I’m referring to Nicole Cabell’s and Andrew Rosenblum’s ravishingly beautiful rendition of “Memories of Prague,” from Selections from Vedem Songs: if this doesn’t hook you, nothing will.) Never in my experience has music so richly beautiful engaged so movingly with the tragic courage it took for the victims of the Holocaust to express themselves in poetry, here rendered in song. Never has the theme of industrial America’s heartless and deadly exploitation of immigrant workers found such tender and evocative, yet daring, expression in song as in the two excerpts from her opera Ludlow. Dialogue sometimes abstruse and sometimes incisively witty also wins here – as in the teacher/student dialogue of Fresh Patterns and (especially) the utterly fabulous Dear Edna that closes the album. The latter is a cycle of four musical responses to the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Laitman’s own setting of “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” is No. 2 of the cycle, and the other three songs are Laitman’s settings of textual responses to Millay’s texts by Jennifer Reeser (b. 1968), Diane Thiel (b. 1967), and A.E. Stallings (b. 1968). In addition to their own wonderful music and perceptive wit, these settings contribute to this remarkable album’s overarching theme of dialogue – between pasts and presents, peoples and ideas, musics and texts.
I can’t close without commenting on the beauty and remarkable invention that characterize Laitman’s music: although her music is generally tonal and relies primarily on conventional means, it is anything but “conventional” – I know of no other composer who seems more committed to never creating works of music as a projection of some generalized Self, but rather as artworks sui generis, utterly unique musical manifestations of their own intersections of text, music, and the ideas and experiences of their creator.
The same goes for the performances themselves: every artist in The Ocean of Eternity seems committed to making their performance as beautiful, and beautifully irreproducible, as Laitman’s music itself is. Sopranos Nicole Cabell, Alisa Jordheim, Maureen McKay, Patrice Michaels, and Yungee Rhie, and mezzo-soprano Katie Hannigan and baritone Daniel Belcher do the same – albeit in completely different ways – for their own voice-types. Violinist Tarn Travers (who contributed much to Laitman’s album Are Women People?) and soprano saxophonist Michael Couper (no relation, I promise) figure centrally and beautifully in “Thoughts” (the last of the Vedem Songs) and The Ocean of Eternity, and pianist Tze-Wen (Julia) Lin delivers the alternatively rhythmic and lyrical piano part of “Thoughts” with power and charm. Pianist ChoEun Lee adds great beauty to the title track. And pianist Andrew Rosenblum (who likewise helped to make Are Women People? such a glittering musical success) is an important voice here – always responding to the nuanced and varied musical styles, uniformly excellent tying together the ensembles.
To sum up: The Ocean of Eternity may well be the finest yet of Lori Laitman’s albums of art song. Those who know her previous albums (and I admit that I’m a fan) know that this album delivers what expectation warrants. Her characteristic mixture of poetic insight, inexhaustible imagination, sonorous beauty, skillful writing for the voices and instruments, and of course humor – this sometimes philosophically tinged – is abundantly present. The performances are uniformly stunning and the album’s net effect is perhaps best summed up as: “let us have more soon, please.” It’s an album I’m glad to have as a part of my musical experience, to carry around as part of my musical self.
Due to my work on other projects I’ve been absent from this blog for some time. I’m happy – and, honestly, honored – that this marvelous album is what occasions my return.
The Ocean of Eternity: The Songs of Lori Laitman (Acis APL16565) is available on Amazon.com here and on all major streaming platforms.