Mezzo Fleur Barron (photograph by Victoria Cadisch, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)
Last night San Francisco Performances presented the recital debut of mezzo Fleur Barron in Herbst Theatre. She prepared a program that accounted for sixteen composers and concluded with two Chinese folk songs. She was accompanied at the piano by Kunal Lahiry.
The title of her program was The Power and the Glory. This was an ironic take on works that were selected “to confront the legacies of imperial control,” as described in the opening sentence of the program note by Natasha Loges. This was clearly a program “with a message,” which remained me of a (dated) quip from student days: “If I have a message, I’ll send it through Western Union.”
Nevertheless, there was plenty of “message” in the songs Barron had selected (translated into English in the program book when necessary). Her delivery was consistently solid, but I am afraid I cannot say the same for Lahiry. There were too many selections in which he was either overplaying or undermining. A broader scope of undermining could be found in the “Envy” movement from Kurt Weill’s score for the ballet chanté in seven scenes, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” where no piano arrangement could possibly rise to the level of the ironies of the original instrumentation.
Taken as a whole, this was a program that looked better on paper than it came across in performance. While this may have had more to do with the accompaniment than with Barron’s prodigious and extensive vocal qualities, over the course of performance it is only the “total package” that matters. Barron may have been generously well informed about both the texts she delivered and the music she sang, but she could not rise above the shortcomings of her accompanist.
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