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Emily D’Angelo’s second solo album freezing, comprises seventeen songs drawn from the folk tradition, art song and beyond. Praised by The New York Times as “one of the world’s special young singers”, the Canadian mezzo-soprano offers a personal take on music that spans five centuries, ranging from songs by John Dowland and Henry Purcell; Rebecca Clarke, Zoltán Kodály, W.C. Handy and Philip Glass; to recent works by Randy Newman, Jeanine Tesori, Cecilia Livingston, “Adrian Ira” Kramer and US band Ween.

D’Angelo is joined on freezing by Sophia Muñoz (piano), Bruno Helstroffer (electric guitar) and Jonas Niederstadt (bass guitar, synth, percussion). Between the four of them, they have created eloquent new arrangements of thirteen of the album tracks. All four musicians appear on the title track, Philip Glass’s Freezing, with lyrics by Suzanne Vega, which is released as a single on 16 August 2024. The album itself is set for digital release on 30 August.

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The programming, arrangement and recording of freezing occurred over a twelve-month period, and three recording sessions. “You have to live with the songs for a while to feel sure that they work as a programme,” notes D’Angelo. “The process involved the discovery of new repertoire, and a return to pieces I’ve known for a long time. I sang Kodály’s Evening Song (Esti Dal), for instance, in choir as a child; it popped into my head as something that would suit this particular configuration of pieces. And Walter MacNutt’s Take Me to a Green Isle was also part of my early musical experience; it’s a little gem by a Canadian composer from Prince Edward Island, where there were many Scottish and Irish settlers.”

Both the Kodály and the MacNutt have piano accompaniment, as do songs as varied as Rebecca Clarke’s two Yeats settings, Down by the Salley Gardens and The Cloths of Heaven; Morning Star, whose lyrics were added to a W.C. Handy spiritual for the 1958 biopic of the composer (St. Louis Blues), starring Nat King Cole; and Wandering Boy, from the 2017 Randy Newman album Dark Matter. D’Angelo and Muñoz are joined by Helstroffer’s guitar in contemporary Canadian composer Cecilia Livingston’s Lullabies, two lyrical and wintry settings of poems by Walter de la Mare, Snow and Silver.

Helstroffer, an early music specialist, also accompanies D’Angelo in Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell and Purcell’s O Solitude, offering the simplicity and clarity required by such intimate songs. His crystalline guitar sound is equally effective not only in Arthur Russell’s Wonder Boy, and a brand-new work by Canadian singer-songwriter and operatic tenor Adrian Ira, Quietly Waiting, but also in O Love is Teasing, a traditional song made famous in the 1950s by Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie.

Another of freezing’s reinterpreted folk songs is the English ballad Cold Blows the Wind (also known as “The Unquiet Grave”), arranged for voice, synth and bass guitar from the version created by Aaron Freeman and Michael Melchiondo (aka Ween). Double bass (played by Fridolin Blumer) brings a new acoustic texture to Night Drive from Jeanine Tesori’s new opera Grounded, in which D’Angelo stars at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in September. By contrast, the singer ends the album with a pure, unaccompanied version of Wild Mountain Thyme, an old Scottish folk melody reworked in the early 1900s by the Belfast-born musician Francis McPeake.

“On some level this album is about getting out of the way and allowing the songs to speak for themselves, while highlighting how music evolves and changes over time,” explains D’Angelo. “Jean Ritchie based O Love is Teasing on a tune that came to the United States from Scotland or Ireland. Like many songs, it made its way from Europe to America, taking on a new shape before making its way back to Europe and beyond. Likewise, Ween, one of my favourite bands, took the text of the old English folk song Cold Blows the Wind and reimagined it as a psychedelic rock ballad. There are no wrong answers! I hope that freezing will exist as a part of that tradition."