Cary Ratcliff CD release party

w/soprano Kathryn Lewek, mezzo-soprano Allyn Van Dusen, and oboist Richard Killmer

Pittsford Presbyterian Church, 25 Church St

Sunday, June 22

7:30 p.m. | Free | 586-5688

Cary Ratcliff ordered Greek food with an eye on the clock. He had about an hour to eat before a rehearsal on a recent Tuesday night. When the guy from Sinbad's promised to deliver in time, the composer hung up, walked into his tidy Park Avenue living room, and sat down. A new copy of Oliver Sack's book "Musicophilia"sat unopened on the coffee table. Nearby lay a FedEx envelope containing legal papers granting him power to care for his aging father, 3000 miles away in California.

"I spend hours on the phone," he said with a grimace.

Ratcliff is a lean man with deep-set eyes and a prominent chin. When he's not worrying about his declining parent, he's usually up in the dream world of his attic studio, composing songs about the pause between the seasons of life, fading beauty, and the moment when one reality vanishes while another takes shape.

His new CD, "Kathryn Lewek Sings the Music of Cary Ratcliff," includes pieces he's been working on for years. Some were commissioned, others he wrote for his wife, Marjorie Relin. All are based on poems that, to the composer, begged to be sung.

"[Writing art songs] is sort of a lost art, and I believe in it," Ratcliff says.

The poem "Leaving a House Long Lived In" by Rochester writer Bob Koch grabbed him, he says, because it's a metonymy for something bigger. Koch has lived with the debilitating effects of polio. In a state of heightened physical awareness, the poet describes how "each day the house of our life demanded my muscles be especially tuned" to the features of a particular place. Ratcliff, inspired by Koch's lyric, wrote a flowing accompaniment set against an athletic tune that stretches up and falls down more than an octave. Jaunty, pointed phrases generate momentum. Modulations suggest the movement from room to room. The house might be a metaphor for anything: leaving a lover, a country, or a state of mind.

"A single human voice and a piano are still a complete world for me," he says.

Ratcliff's songs are based on works from a range of poets, including Denise Levertov, Christina Rosetti, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Many explore emotions evoked by the passage of time. In Garcia Grindal's lyric "I am my mother I am not," a woman stares into the mirror and tries not to notice herself clicking her brush twice against the side of the sink, just like her mother. In his setting of "The Last Rose of Summer," by 19th century Irish poet Thomas Moore, the composer writes in an ambiguous vein, flirting with major and minor keys, unsettled. The piano is austere and dreamy, the singer almost buoyant with pain.

"I respect the small number of poets still writing in verse," Ratcliff says, crediting the influence of composers Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Luigi Dallapiccola. "I love alliteration, consonance, and slant rhyme. Most poets have jettisoned rhythm."

Ratcliff's new CD features two singers, long-time collaborator Allyn Van Dusen and Eastman graduate Kathryn Lewek, who was recently named the grand prizewinner of the Orpheus National Vocal Competition.

"The thing I love most about Cary's songs is that amidst chaos come these incredible beautiful moments that take your breath away," Lewek said on the phone from a friend's apartment. Lewek says she relishes the jazzy, impressionistic feeling of Ratcliff songs such as "If you Love for Beauty," based on a Ruckert poem.

"If you love for beauty," she sings on the new recording, "O love not me. Go love the sun with her golden hair." She dismisses the suitor attracted to youth, beauty, and money. They're transient. With oboist Richard Killmer, she ascends a melodic staircase to a blinding, white plain of revelation. For the right kind of love, she declares, ending on a high F, "I will love you forever."

In all of Ratcliff's songs, Lewek delivers a bright, burnished tone. She has remarkable range and never sacrifices tonal beauty for the sake of articulation or pitch. The soprano plans to begin studies with Deborah Birnbaum, an internationally known teacher, in August. 

Grape-leaf dolmas, hummus, and triangles of pita arrived in plastic trays. The composer carried the food outside to eat at a table in his wife's garden. Roses bloomed a few feet away.

He talks about this year's artistic milestones. His third opera, "Eleni," was featured in New York City Opera's prestigious VOX festival as one of 10 notable new American operas. Ratcliff's children's opera "Mice and Beans" was recently staged in San Diego. In a few weeks, the Rochester Oratorio Society and conductor Eric Townell will take a portion of Ratcliff's "Ode to Common Things" to Beijing and Shanghai, and the Austin Symphony and Chorus plan to perform Ratcliff's entire "Ode," a luscious oratorio based on poems by Pablo Neruda, in 2010.

"When I'm 60," Ratcliff said, "I'm going to take up watercolor. When I'm 65, I'm going to pick up the French horn."

He stared down at his food.

"Right now, I just don't have the time."

Brenda Tremblay blogs about classical music at brendatremblay.com and hosts RPO broadcast concerts Monday nights at 8 p.m. on Classical 91.5, WXXI-FM.