Last night may well go down as a high point in the history of the Schwabacher Recital Series, now in its 37th season. Named after James Schwabacher, a co-founder of the Merola Opera Program, the concert offerings were intended to provide an opportunity to showcase the talents of the exemplary artists who have participated in the training programs of the Merola Opera Program and/or the San Francisco Opera Center. The latter was created in 1982 and has thrived under its Director Sheri Greenawald, who will be retiring at the end of this calendar year; and through its “tandem” relationship with the summer Merola Opera Program, it has produced a list of alumni that reads like a Who’s Who of major opera talent, past and present.
In the context of all of those credentials, last night’s recital soared above any expectations of “rising talent.” The second half of the program was devoted entirely to mezzo Simone McIntosh, 2018 Merola alumna, who made her debut with the San Francisco Opera (SFO) this past June in the cast of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 114 opera Rusalka. Any performance of Rusalka makes for an adventurous challenge for any number of reasons, but last night McIntosh moved boldly into even more challenging territory with a performance of the twelve songs in Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi cycle. This music is as much of a challenge to the pianist as it is to the vocalist; and the bottom line is that, working as a team, McIntosh and pianist Robert Mollicone could not have delivered a more convincing account of the cycle that Messiaen subtitled “Chant d’amour et de mort” (song of love and death).
This conjunction of love and death was highly personal. Harawi was composed in 1945, not long after his wife Claire Delbos had begun to suffer from loss of memory. She was subsequently institutionalized in a sanatorium, suffering from continuing decline in her health until her death in 1959. In that context it is important to note that Messiaen composed his own texts for the Harawi songs. The title refers to an Andean style of love song, which tends to end in the death of the two lovers. That theme of love and death is, of course, also the key element in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde opera; and, as Messiaen’s career progressed, Harawi became the first part of what has been called his “Tristan trilogy.” (The other two parts, the “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and Cinq Rechants were completed in 1948, again reflecting on Delbos’ declining mental and physical health.)
For the most part the texts of the songs take a symbolist approach to connotation, rather than denoting a narrative. In addition the very nature of word breaks down into onomatopoeia; and the title of the eighth song in the cycle is “Syllabes” (syllables). (It is worth observing that McIntosh prepared the translations of these texts for the program book. I was pleasantly reminded of how Julia Bullock had prepared her own translations of the French texts she had performed last month with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony.)
The piano part, in turn, has its own approaches to connotation. Messiaen had a long-standing interest in natural sounds. Catalogue d’oiseux (catalogue of birds), composed between 1956 and 1958, is exactly what the title says it is: music for solo piano that reproduces the calls of thirteen birds (each having its own movement) to the best of the composer’s abilities.
Beyond such a source of “natural music,” Messiaen often tried to capture the very forces of nature in his orchestral music, examples being “Chronochromie” (time-color) and “Des Canyons aux étoiles…” (from the canyons to the stars), inspired by a visit to Bryce Canyon. Harawi presents one of Messiaen’s earliest attempts to realize those sonorities within the limits of a single piano. Mollicone clearly appreciated the composer’s “mission;” and the technical skills he mustered to that end were nothing short of downright awesome.
It is also worth observing that the performance was “semi-staged.” Both McIntosh and Mollicone had outfits that clearly differentiated their offering from a “garden-variety recital.” (Mollicone’s all-white outfit was positively workman-like.) McIntosh also provided herself with a generous amount of movement, much of which supplemented the extended piano passages that Mollicone had to perform. As a result the performance was effective as a visual experience as well as an auditory one.
By all rights, Harawi could have stood as a program unto itself. However, in keeping with the broader Schwabacher agenda, the Messiaen composition was performed after the intermission. The first half was devoted to tenor Zhengyi Bai, a Merola alumnus currently in the second year of his Adler Fellowship with SFO. He began the evening with four of the six ariettas that Vincenzo Bellini collected in his Composizioni da Camera (chamber compositions).
This was followed by the four songs collected in Richard Strauss’ Opus 27. Here I am afraid I must take issue with an inaccuracy in the program book. Karl Friedrich Henckell was listed as the author all four of the poems that Strauss had set. The fact is that only the first song, “Ruhe, meine Seele” (rest, my soul) is based on Henckell’s text. The words for the second song, “Cäcilie” (Cecily), were by Heinrich Hart; and those of the remaining two songs were by John Henry Mackay. The last song in the collection, “Morgen!” (tomorrow), is one of Strauss’ most frequently performed songs; and, as previously observed, the opening piano passage even made it to the Billboard “Hot 100!”
Sadly, Bai turned out to be one of those examples of an opera singer not yet adjusting to the more intimate space of a recital. The Bellini selections were clearly far lighter in rhetoric than just about anything he wrote for the opera stage. Sadly, Bai bellowed his way through all four of the songs, never quite coming to grips that this was not the repertoire of bel canto opera. His approach to Strauss was somewhat more moderated; but it was only when he realized that the piano had to take charge in “Morgen!” that he managed to home in on a rhetorical stance appropriate to Strauss’ settings.
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