The Leader CD reviewed in Opera News

Not much happens in the ten scenes of this thirty-five-minute work, which is partly the point. Most of the satire comes from the mindless repetition of certain phrases. “There he is! There he is! There he is! At the end of the street! There’s the Leader! He’s coming nearer, nearer, nearer,” sings the Announcer (Mark Diamond) at the beginning of the first track, “It’s Better If He Doesn’t See Us,” and then, at the end, “Hooray! The leader! Long live the leader! Too bad! He’s going away.” He’s joined in his sycophantic commentary by two Admirers amid a cheerfully pulsing musical texture, featuring a swirling figure for the solo woodwinds and a pungent, Poulenc-like harmonic language that proves a good match for Ionesco’s mocking aesthetic. Diamond is artfully unctuous in his grand, vacuous pronouncements; Megan Berti and Aidan Smerud echo him with pleasant (and alarming) brainlessness, particularly in the fourth track, in which their rapid-fire parroting of the Announcer’s phrases turns briefly into a laughing song.

Ionesco also provides a love story, in his characteristic absurdist fashion: the couple falls instantly in love after affirming that they don’t know each other and therefore have something in common. Al-Zand captures the deadpan drollery and gives it life with a fresh, piquant musical language and earnest, melismatic, self-mocking declamations. The short scene soars briefly into a lyrical love duet, allowing soprano Lindsay Russell Bowden and tenor Zach Averyt to flex their operatic chops while highlighting the silliness of love at first sight.

In later scenes, mini episodes are given over to the ridiculous: “They’ve given the leader’s trousers back! He puts them on!” and “The leader’s sucking his thumb!” This kind of thing could wear thin in less skilled hands, but Al-Zand provides continuous musical invention, including a fast, off-kilter jig in seven (2+2+3), breakneck orchestral skittering, a chorale with crunchy harmonies and a militaristic march that implies incipient creeping Fascism. The Leader had a full staging in February 2020, but it’s easy to imagine successful concert performances as well. The eleven-piece ensemble, led with precision by Eiki Isomura, gives a crackerjack rendering of the virtuoso score.

Also included here is Songs From the Post TruthEra,a setting of three poems combined into a single continuous piece,which promises more skewering of ripe targets, though it doesn’t draw quite as much blood as one might hope. The first poem, Charles Lamb’s “Incorrect Speaking” (1809), is an admonition to a young girl and contains lines such as “Study well the sense of each / Sentence, lest in any manner / It misrepresent the truth.” The second two poems are mashups of words and phrases from Lamb, a technique Al-Zand calls “vocabularyclept.” These fractured texts (intentionally) make less and less sense as they proceed, and Al-Zand accordingly puts soprano Alexandra Smither through vocal calisthenics of ever-increasing difficulty—all of which she aces—amid her character’s mounting hysteria. Bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, the sole accompanist in this unusually scored piece, is an equal partner and matches Smither’s remarkable expressive prowess.