Her gushing consonants, fondling portamentos and libidinous low notes on the line “the white heat of his flesh makes me sweat” convey intense carnal-even sadomasochistic-desire. With her supple mezzo, Samantha Hankey transforms the meaning of the smothered Elf’s distressed cries from inside a rose placed over the Beloved’s (still-beating) heart. This uncanny quality may have something to do with the erotic energy the composer teases from Andersen’s ostensibly innocent children’s story. Hertzberg’s score revels in this sinister allure, its eerier passages conjuring the bony-fingered imps and gnarled trees of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations. The standard star-cross’d-lover scenario is embellished with literary images that are both charming and unsettling, notably the cluster of jasmine that grows from a pot containing the Beloved’s decomposing head. Moreover, his compositional style is indebted to the refined decadence of that period the endlessly swelling textures and iridescent color palette are especially evocative of Scriabin. The composer is a skilled poet, his libretto steeped in the arcane language of fin-de-siècle Spiritualism and Symbolism. He’s selected another dark fairy tale, this time a supernatural murder-mystery by Hans Christian Andersen. This latest disc documents Hertzberg’s 2018 follow-up, The Rose Elf, which probes the same realms of the fantastic as his earlier success. A CD set of that breakout work, issued last year, confirmed that all the praises and prizes heaped on it were merited. DAVID HERTZBERG’S comet-like ascent into the operatic cosmos was launched by his 2017 adaptation of occultist Aleister Crowley’s Wake World.
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