ALLISON CHARNEY, ALIKE - My Mother's Dream

It happens in all genres of music. When a highly respected, visionary artist creates a majestic, multi-faceted work of great social importance, rooted in a poignant personal narrative yet also expressing powerful and important universal themes, there’s a tendency to make the concept and theme the major story at the expense of appreciating the rich beauty and intricate grandeur of the music and performance itself.

So up front, before we immerse in the inspiration behind and higher purpose of internationally acclaimed soprano Allison Charney’s official debut solo album ALIKE – My Mother’s Dream, it must be noted that she is in expectedly magnificent, elegantly transcendent voice throughout, as she and her ensemble of featured instrumental soloists – backed by the ever-sweeping grace of the National Symphonia Orchestra, conducted with grandeur and great sensitivity by Benjamin Loeb – perform a consciousness awakening and soul transformative program comprised of three re-imagined pieces from the Romantic Era of Classical Music (roughly 1820-1900) and four from living composers.

Though it evolved from the starting point of “Invocation,” a truly mesmerizing, glorious and sweeping piece composer Kim D. Sherman had written for Charney years earlier as part of the United Nations Women’s Peace Initiative, the emotional core of ALIKE are what she calls the “country pairs” composed by musicians with roots in countries that are traditionally and currently at great odds with one another, i.e. Russia/Ukraine and Iran/Israel.

Experienced in sequence, these collectively create a generationally echoing response to the lessons Charney’s still very much alive mother taught her – among them, to focus on what makes us alike as human beings (hence the album’s title) rather than what separates us. A simple concept, sure – but as we see from the constant conflicts between people and nations sharing this sacred planet, including countless strife in our time, this ideal often seems out of our grasp. Still, we must try, which is why the vocalist pours forth her passion into this impactful labor of love.

One can see how an embrace of a concept so bold – that music unites and transcends the darker human impulses while political egos and lust for power, among other destructive sins, divides – could overshadow the powerful music illustrating its points here, but let’s not let it. Even if we didn’t know about Charney’s mom, and the larger point of these unique pairings, ALIKE, both sonically and on a pure emotional level, resonates and speaks the great joys and harrowing pain of the human experience, to our souls.   

“This album was critical now,” Charney says, “because I fear the world is becoming a place so divided, so filled with hate and so absent of the ability to listen to one another, that I felt I had to try to do something. I don’t mean for this to be a political statement at all – in fact, quite the opposite. It’s about striving to find our shared humanity, which I fear is becoming less and less possible each passing day. What I do best is sing – and bring together incredible musicians in collaboration – so I made this album to sing the lessons I hope we can all try to learn. I realize this project is just a drop in the bucket in terms of doing something to help repair the world. However, I think if we all just put in our one drop, just one, perhaps we can fill the bucket together…until it overflows with goodness.”  

Happy to inform us that her mother is “still kicking” and making a difference every day of her life, Charney graciously shares the source of her mother’s beliefs that both inform ALIKE and form sacred wisdom we can all draw inspiration from. “She was inspired to find the best in people by her uncle Everett, who fought on the front lines in WWII and sent a letter to his then three year old niece saying he had a dream while puffing on his cigar,” she says. “In one puff of smoke, he saw an image of her, a sweet little Jewish girl from the United States, and in the next puff he saw an image of a sweet little German girl. It was his dream that the two little girls would grow up to be friends. My mom has lived her life in pursuit of friendship between people(s) who are traditionally/historically at odds with one another. She never shies away from difficult conversations with people with whom she might disagree, which she approaches with a goal of finding common ground.”

The launch piece “Invocation” – also a perfect entry point to the ALIKE experience, despite being the sixth song in the tracking – has been part of Charney’s life for a long time, most recently released in 2024 as a single featuring a duet with vocalist Will Liverman as a musical prayer for peace in Eastern Europe. It’s wonderful to hear the soprano perform it solo, singing Sherman’s key phrase “Make peace on all your lands” in 15 different world languages, and I stand by my description of its earlier incarnation as “an exquisitely performed, emphatically hopeful and forward-thinking piece of operatic and orchestral brilliance.” It’s an empowering journey with gentler, slightly wistful moments giving way to swelling orchestral moments of optimism, and even more relevant to our lives a year later.   

Though less than two and a half minutes long, Charney’s sensitive, lyrical and beautifully intuitive adaptation of Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is essential to establishing the mother-daughter connection at the heart of ALIKE. Written in 1880 as part of his cycle Gypsy Songs, Dvorak’s breathtaking piece set the poems of Adolf Heyduk to music. Hence we can appreciate Charney’s heartfelt interpretation as the musical equivalent of the wisdom her own mother has imparted. Considering that the piece has been recorded by countless operatic greats as well as instrumental giants like Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, it’s a bold choice for establishing the premise here – but Charney delivers with supreme sensitivity as she imparts words that translate to “When my aging mother taught me to sing Tears would often hang from her eyelashes. Now when I teach my little ones to sing Tears often trickle down my cheek.” The track was released as a standalone lead single a month before the full album dropped.

Opening with the sweetly soaring violin of Kelly Hall-Tompkins drifting over Gaye Le Blanc's angelic harp, the expansive, lushly orchestrated “Song of Songs” by Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963), one of the first Ukranian composers to gain worldwide recognition, is a remarkable discovery whose narrative (sung with remarkable exuberance by Charney) is based on the sensual Biblical text. The composer was held prisoner in a Russian gulag for over a decade beginning in 1948, and during this time, all of his manuscripts were destroyed in a fire. Once freed, he spent the rest of his life trying to recreate his life’s work. Though originally composed for soprano, violin and piano, this arrangement by American composer Chris Prather featuring full orchestra, solo harp, solo violin and celesta is wondrous to behold. This nearly eight-minute masterwork is all the more remarkable because it’s the first ever recording of this original arrangement and for many people outside of Ukraine, likely their introduction to this great but too often overlooked composer.   

Charney couldn’t have chosen a more powerful piece to represent Israel and its culture than Marianna Rosett’s “Kaddish,” which despite its origin as a song of mourning (an element conveyed artfully by Peter Seidenberg’s stunning cello), has charming, uplifting moments conveying the joy the departed must now be experiencing in the afterlife, with Charney inviting us beyond the veil to see them “laughing, dancing in the lanes, by the lake, in the fields.”

The fact that the piece has any levity at all is a bit of a miracle considering the origin of the piece. Born to concentration camp survivors just after the war, Rosett grew up feeling her parents were shielding her from their sadness. She learned that they had, long before she was born, witnessed the murders of her half siblings. She wrote “Kaddish,” based on the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning, for these “ghost brothers.” Charney’s ability to convey peace and joy amidst the darkness is an aural wonder to behold.   

While the soprano has frequently made her own moments of musical history on stage singing Puccini and Mozart, she’s making a whole new kind of it on this album by including the 10 minute centerpiece of the first English language recording of Amy Beach’s long lost setting of the Biblical story of “Jephthah’s Daughter.” Again, true to the theme of music surviving despite the evil intentions of mankind, the story goes that Beach hand delivered her only manuscript of the score to her favorite soprano in France in the early 1900s – only to have the trunk it was in confiscated by the German army during WWI.

It was uncovered over a century later and Charney had the handwritten manuscript transcribed and turned into an orchestral score with parts her team recorded for this album, including the solo harp, exquisitely performed by Kirsten Agresta Copely. She felt the long absence of this piece in the canon of classical music made it a perfect fit here – an illustration that one of the victims of war can be the loss of great art. But music conquers all, and Charney delivers one of her most dramatic and soulful narrative performances sharing Beach’s long-lost genius with the world.  

When listening to Charney’s lovely, emotive and passion-charged voice lifting above conductor Benjamin Loeb’s intense piano chords and Allison Loggins-Hull's dancing alto flute on Iranian composer Kian Ravaei’s intense, adventurous “Morghe Sahar,” suggests a commitment to

beautifying the world through love. Based on a traditional Iranian folk song, his empathic arrangement for soprano, alto flute, cello and piano shrouds a traditionally monophonic melody with a colorful harmony to reflect the sorrow of an oppressed people. He originally wrote it for mezzo-soprano and piano, so Charney expanded it and extended its range to accommodate her soprano voice.

Beginning and underscored throughout with the dark, haunting duality of piano and cello, Russian composer Lera Auerbach’s “Postscriptum” may run only three minutes but the simplicity of its arrangement, paired only with Charney’s otherworldly voice, makes it one of the album’s most exquisite and moving pieces – its dreamlike quality making it the perfect closing track for ALIKE – My Mother’s Dream. The composer describes it as a haunting nostalgic memory of something you think happened to you in your past but actually did not. To Charney, it’s a prayerful reminder that our work is not done, and maybe it never will be. But as she says, “We must keep putting our drops of goodness into the bucket if we have any hope for it to overflow.”

“I think what I loved most about making this album,” she says “is the intense, supportive, generous collaboration that was involved - from the composers and arrangers to the featured artists to the conductor to the producers and engineers. Everyone was really in this together, always putting the music first but never forgetting to care about each other as we put it all together. And isn’t that exactly what I hoped to convey in the first place?”