Last night the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) streamed a recital of performances by ten students in the Vocal Department. The video itself did not appear to be “live,” which was probably beneficial, since the intervals between the individual presentations were shortened. It appears that the video itself is now available for subsequent viewing through a Web page on the Vimeo Web site. The performances appear to have taken place in the Recital Hall, although the SFCM event page claims that the venue was the Concert Hall. Each vocalist sang in front of a piano whose lid was raised but did not have a pianist at the keyboard. Accompaniment by Kevin Korth was out of sight, and he was probably playing from the “orchestra pit” area, which would have been suitable for eye contact between pianist and vocalist. (The raised lid on the stage probably facilitated vocal projection.)
I have to confess that the high point of the program was a very personal matter. One of my first contacts with the opera repertoire came about because my parents had an album of three 78s entitled A Night at Carnegie Hall. I would learn much later that the content of that album was taken from the soundtrack of Edgar G. Ulmer’s film Carnegie Hall, presenting vocal selections by bass Ezio Pinza, coloratura soprano Lily Pons, and mezzo Risë Stevens. The Pons selection was the longest, the only one required two 78 sides. It was the “Bell Song” from the second act of Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé, sung by the title character. I had very little (if any) idea of what the song was about or how it figured in the opera. All that mattered were the virtuoso demands on the vocal acrobatics and the facility with which Pons delivered them.
Anna Aistova singing Delibes’ “Bell Song” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Last night’s program concluded with a performance of this aria by Anna Aistova, and I was more than a little impressed by the facility with which she nailed it. She kept her gestures to a minimum, but all of them fit in with the text she was singing. (Yes, I am much more familiar with this aria now than I was in my childhood.) However, the heart of the music involves wordless vocalizing, almost as if the soprano was a new (not to mention extraordinary) species of wind instrument. Aistova’s performance left the impression that she appreciated the “instrumental” nature of those passages and was channeling how a wind player would have presented them.
As might be expected, the rest of the program leading up to this conclusion tended to be uneven. I was struck by how many of the selections had texts in English. Since there were no titles, I found myself reflecting on matters of diction and how the different composers approached those matters. The composer that came across as doing the best job of serving the clarity of the words was Mark Adamo, represented by “Things change, Jo” from his Little Women opera. He knew how to endow relatively flat prose with an engaging musical “shape;” but that “shape” never obscured the semantic infrastructure. Mezzo Meghan Jolliffe could not have provided a better platform for presenting Adamo’s skills. In many respects Charlie’s aria from Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers was delivered by Kurt Winterhalter with the same level of clarity, but Gene Scheer’s libretto comes across too much like a political tract. To be fair, however, Adamo had the advantage of working from a more literary source.
No comments:
Post a Comment