Search - Sanford Sylvan, Jorge Martin, David Breitman :: The Glass Hammer: Scenes from Childhood Kept against Forgetting (Poetry by Andrew Hudgins)

The Glass Hammer is an hourlong cycle of 15 songs by Jorge Martin, a Cuban-American composer. Andrew Hudgins's poems often occupy the twilight zone between heightened prose and poetry. They're about growing up in a hardscrabble rural Southern setting replete with dysfunctional, often violent family confrontations, the resultant feelings of anger, a child's groping for meaning in an arbitrary world, the awakenings of sexual feelings, and ultimately, the compassion and forgiveness that mark the passage to maturity. The glass hammer of the title is a knickknack crystal hammer the child breaks, a symbol of fragile innocence. Martin's music, like the texts, encompasses both the declamatory aspects of vocal writing and the lyric expressiveness of the poetry. Drama is the governing force, so while we don't get the flowing melodies in each song we might expect from traditional Romantic song cycles, we do get powerful drama and many rewarding lyrical passages. It's odd that coming-of-age themes, common in literature, are relatively rare in music, so this moving cycle is doubly welcome. Much credit goes to the performers. Sanford Sylvan captures the work's emotional strength; he's as good in the lyrical moments as in the declamatory ones. His fine-grained baritone ranges from the chantlike opening of "The Rapture" to fragments of gospel to the energetic, even frantic scenes of domestic violence. David Breitman is as impressive in the active piano part, which carries much of the emotional burden of the work. --Dan Davis