Jay Bernfeld, Rinat Shaham, Fuoco e cenere - Fantasy in Blue: Purcell & Gershwin (2001)

Did the world need to hear Gershwin played by a viol consort, with an occasional recorder tootling along? If so, then why not Purcell accompanied by a jazz piano? The idea of combining the two composers in one performance is an attractive one, and the mix of vocal and instrumental pieces by each composer here is intelligently grouped. Arranger and leader Jay Bernfeld offers several parallels. Both composers were, in the broadest sense, urban sensations and musical-theater composers with bigger things on their minds; both managed to complete one towering opera before dying young. He might have added more items to his list: the ground basses of Purcell's time are elaborated by their melody lines in a manner akin to, if not precisely comparable to, the structure of Gershwin's songs. Israeli-born mezzo soprano Rinat Shaham gives this project her best, successfully pushing Gershwin just a bit in the direction of art song and Purcell just a bit in the direction of musical theater. There are points where she makes the whole thing worth hearing: her Embraceable You has a graceful allure, and she does as well as any non-native speaker of English could with such lines as "Don't be a naughty baby/Come to mama, come to mama, do." Yet in the end the viol consort, and Bernfeld's arrangements for it, straitjacket Gershwin's music. Sample the instrumental rendering of Sweet and Low Down (track 15); it feels forced, because Gershwin's rhythms aren't given room to breathe. They get the needed room in a few of Shaham's renditions, where she takes control, but the disc ultimately has the feel of an experiment in progress rather than of a fully realized joining of two repertoires.